Marketplace Tech

When companies change names, sometimes they stick. Google introduced Alphabet six years ago, and it seems to have worked out. Netflix tried to introduce Qwikster a decade ago, and it definitely didn’t. Now, Facebook is taking on Meta as its new corporate name. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Anthony Shore, a linguist who founded the company Operative Words to name companies and products. He said that when it comes to a corporate rebrand, Meta … pretty much works.

This weekend kicked off COP26 — the United Nations Climate conference in Glasgow. The country commitments made this week could determine what the world will look like in just a few decades. And those countries are turning to advanced climate models to imagine that world. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist and is the Director of Climate and Energy for The Breakthrough Institute, about these models.

Facebook is rebranding. Mark Zuckerberg announced it’s now going to be called Meta. The move is meant to focus attention on the company’s efforts to build a virtual world known as the metaverse. Perhaps a welcome pivot for the company, especially in light of internal research leaked to the press that included revelations of Facebook’s negative effects on the mental health of teenagers, democracies around the world and the way people communicate with each other. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal writer who first reported the leaks.

Your regular host Molly Wood has a new podcast, “How We Survive,” exploring solutions to the climate crisis. In the latest episode, “The Resource,” Molly visits the Salton Sea region of California, its mud volcanoes, moving geyser, and lithium-rich brine — lithium, as in the lithium needed for batteries. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams talks with Molly about how getting that brine out of the ground is really challenging.

Some major retailers are pulling some Chinese-made surveillance cameras and equipment off their shelves. That’s due to concerns the companies that make the equipment, Lorex and Ezviz, have ties to human rights abuses in China. They’re believed to be part of the vast surveillance network targeting Uyghurs, an ethnic minority group of over 12 million people in the country. This was brought to Home Depot’s attention by the publication TechCrunch, which also reported that Lowe’s and Best Buy stopped selling these products. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Samm Sacks, a cyber policy fellow at the nonprofit New America think tank and a research scholar at Yale.

As we often say on this show, the internet is everything. But for many people, the only place to get access to the internet is the library. That’s a problem on some tribal lands, where many of the libraries are excluded from federal broadband subsidies because they don’t technically fit the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of a library. The FCC has proposed expanding its definition and will hear from tribal librarians and other stakeholders at a roundtable coming up on Wednesday. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams talks to fellow Marketplace reporter Savannah Maher, who has been covering this story.

A lot of NASA’s work has to do with what happens here on Earth, especially as we work to track and respond to the climate crisis. And at NASA’s earth sciences division, much of of the data collected by future missions will be stored in the cloud, hosted by Amazon. That’s partly because the agency needs more, well, space. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Kevin Murphy, the chief science data officer for NASA.

For years, cryptocurrency has been simmering at the edges of the financial system, viewed by many as kind of a fad. Lately, though, it seems like crypto is having a moment. This week, an exchange-traded fund that tracks Bitcoin futures debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. Bitcoin, a pretty volatile asset, has now been accepted, to some degree, by one of the oldest and most traditional marketplaces in the world. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Gil Luria, a technology strategist at D.A. Davidson, who says there several reasons 2021 is becoming a turning point for crypto.

Marketplace has a new podcast called “How We Survive” about solutions to the climate crisis. The latest episode is called “Electrify Everything.” It’s about using electricity generated from renewable sources to power our homes and wean us off our fossil fuel dependence. So, how do we get everyone to adopt this century-old technology of electricity in new ways? Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Molly Wood, the regular “Marketplace Tech” host and host of “How We Survive.”

Ongoing cyber threats to local water and wastewater systems were flagged in an advisory jointly sent out by the FBI, the EPA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last week. It warned that systems to ensure that sewage and other biohazards stay out of our drinking water are vulnerable. The advisory pointed to several cyberattacks in the last few years, like one in Oldsmar, Florida where someone tried to hack in and dump extra chemicals in one municipal system. CISA is urging water and wastewater facilities to plan for, and get ready to block, these attacks. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Kim Zetter, a cybersecurity journalist and author.