Marketplace Tech

We’ve talked about how the accomplishments of Black inventors were literally left out of the history books documenting the early internet. Now, Meghan McCarty Carino speaks to researchers who are preserving that history. In late 2019, archivists from Stanford University met with over a dozen Black engineers and entrepreneurs who had been working in the tech industry for decades to hear their stories.

Platforms like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash emerged big winners from the 2020 election when California voters approved Proposition 22. The ballot measure keeps gig workers classified as independent contractors, rather than employees who qualify for full benefits and protections, including the right to join a union. It had looked like gig companies were ready to take this playbook to other states to basically create their own labor laws at the ballot box. But now, we’re seeing signals the companies and labor unions might be willing to talk to head off more Prop 22-style battles. Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Josh Eidelson, who covers labor for Bloomberg. He said despite the platforms’ victory, there’s still incentive to negotiate.

The dating app Bumble swiped right on its initial public stock offering last week, making its CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, the youngest female CEO to take a company public. Not only that, but eight of the company’s 11 board members also identify as women. And that has more than just symbolic power. Bumble has styled itself a women-first dating app. The platform encourages them to send the first message. It also moderates the photos on profiles and the ones sent through direct messages so users won’t get any revealing content they didn’t ask for. Meghan speaks with Sarah Kunst, the managing director of Cleo Capital, who advised Bumble on its venture capital arm. She asked her if all of that translates into more women on the app than men.

Colby College is a private, liberal arts school located in southern Maine. You can take classes in art history, chemistry, music, all the staples, and now the school is adding artificial intelligence to the list. Colby is among the first liberal arts colleges to create an artificial intelligence institute to teach students about AI and machine learning through the lenses of subjects like history, gender studies and biology. This, of course, comes as the world is grappling with ethics and AI and how to build a moral foundation into algorithms. Molly speaks with David Greene, the president of Colby College. He says that eventually, he’d like every student to study artificial intelligence to graduate.

The Biden administration has made tackling climate change a priority, and a big element of the business story around climate change is risk, to cities, states and countries, to businesses and the banks that invest in all of them. Some regulatory bodies, like the European Central Bank, require climate risk assessment. It’s possible the Federal Reserve may eventually as well. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood speaks with Emilie Mazzacurati, who runs the climate data firm Four Twenty Seven, which was acquired by Moody’s last year. It uses big data analysis to help companies and governments figure out the risk climate change poses to them. This episode originally aired on Dec. 1, 2020.

We learned this week that a hacker tried to poison the water supply in a town outside Tampa, Florida. An operator at the plant noticed the intrusion, and there was no significant damage done to the city’s water supply. But the thing is, a lot of our critical infrastructure is connected to the internet, and not all of it is very secure. Molly speaks with Nicole Perlroth, who covers cybersecurity for The New York Times and is the author of the new book “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race.” She asked her how we could start to tighten things up.

Arguably, the biggest problem with Big Tech is, well, the bigness. A few giant companies gobble up their competition, own the digital advertising and web hosting markets, control the information ecosystem and sometimes control their own rivals’ distribution. So far, though, these worries haven’t led to regulation. Molly speaks with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who leads the subcommittee on antitrust and has introduced a bill intended to check the power of tech giants. It focuses mostly on acquisitions, aimed at preventing huge companies from buying potential competitors and forcing companies that control more than 50% of a market to prove that a deal wouldn’t reduce competition.

We’ve been talking this week about the digital divide in Indian Country. Reservations lag way behind the rest of the country in terms of access to high-speed internet, but the CARES Act created a billion-dollar fund to help tribes build their own networks. Molly speaks with Matthew Rantanen, director of technology at the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association, which runs a wireless network that provides service to 19 tribes near San Diego. He said that $1 billion will help, but the total cost could be seven times higher.

In Indian Country, the proportion of households with high-speed internet access has consistently lagged behind the rest of the U.S. There has been some work to improve things. An influx of federal funding has helped some tribes build their own broadband networks across the country. Here’s a success story from Montana Public Radio’s Aaron Bolton, part of our series “The Internet Is Everything.”

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, announced this week that he’s going to become executive chairman of the company, and the new CEO in July will be Andy Jassy, now the head of Amazon Web Services. Amazon is 26 years old and obviously is massive and has ideas to do everything from package delivery and television production to smart microwaves and artificial intelligence. And its huge and incredibly profitable cloud business. Amazon’s ambition and reach are legendary. But with Bezos taking on a new role, could that change? Molly speaks with Brad Stone, a senior executive editor for Bloomberg. He’s written one book on Amazon and has another coming out this spring. Molly asks him if Amazon might start to focus more on the gold mine of its cloud business.