Host Molly Wood speaks with tech editor Patrick Tucker of Defense One, a news site that covers national security. They discuss Amazon’s recent court win that’s halted the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud project in partnership with Microsoft. Tucker says Amazon did this because it feels as though the contract was awarded to Microsoft simply because President Donald Trump has an iffy relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Host Molly Wood speaks with Marketplace’s workplace reporter Meghan McCarty Carino about Kickstarter’s union, which is considered a big win for Silicon Valley activists and for other tech workers. McCarty Carino says that the union looks at traditional complaints, including pay inequality and work culture, as well as newer issues involving gig workers, diversity in hiring and more.

Host Molly Wood spoke with Mark Scott, chief technology correspondent at Politico, about the potential rules that Europe wants to put in place that might, Scott says, shape the way the digital ecosystem will be for the next decade. Specifically, they spoke about what this means for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an era when his company has been subject to lots of antitrust investigation.

SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund started pumping a lot of money into the tech startup scene around 2018, but it has lost billions in recent months after the WeWork IPO disaster, disappointing returns from Uber, other SoftBank backed companies announcing layoffs or shut down. Now, SoftBank Group is apparently putting in billions of its own money to try to keep Vision Fund Two going. Molly Wood spoke with Paul Kedrosky from SK Ventures about what she called a burble in the startup economy.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission said it would examine hundreds of past tech deals to see if they were hurting the competitive landscape. Big tech companies buy a lot of startups, either to acquire technology or to get their hands on hot engineering talent — a system that benefits venture capitalists. In fact, mergers and acquisitions is by far the most common way for VCs to make back their money and then some. If the FTC puts a damper on deals, it could be a problem. Molly Wood spoke with Paul Kedrosky, an investor with SK Ventures, and he said folks are stressing.

It was probably a busy weekend on Tinder with Valentine’s Day and all. Hopefully it was also a safe weekend on Tinder. The company last month announced a panic button feature for the app to let users report if they feel unsafe on a date, as well as a check-in feature to let your friends know where you are when you’re out with someone. But as always, there’s a catch. You have to share your location constantly to use the new features. Molly Wood spoke with Marketplace’s media reporter Jasmine Garsd who told said that these changes are happening partly because maybe Tinder itself isn’t a very good date.

Some 80,000 people live in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, the world’s largest for people fleeing the war in Syria. As the camp has evolved from a temporary tent city to a semi-permanent settlement of prefabricated houses, a surprising challenge has emerged: what to do with thousands of discarded mattresses. Chemist Tony Ryan from the University of Sheffield knew exactly what to do — use them to grow food. Amy Scott spoke with Victoria Gill, who reported this story for BBC.

This week, the Federal Trade Commission demanded that the five biggest tech companies turn over years of information on some of their past acquisitions. They’re not focusing on the big purchases, like Facebook buying Instagram or Google buying Waze, its navigation competitor, but more on the tiny ones that were too small to be reported to antitrust officials. Molly Wood spoke with Diane Bartz, who covers antitrust for Reuters, about all of this.

At any given time, Wikipedia’s army of volunteer editors might be fighting a raging battle to make sure that a page contains the truth. That’s happening this week on Wikipedia entries about the coronavirus. Considering the state of information online, Wikipedia’s goal of providing free information for no incentive other than providing information is reassuring, assuming it can beat back the trolls. Host Molly Wood spoke with Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, and asked her how often the site gets hit by misinformation campaigns.

In recent days, we’ve started to find out how much money YouTube and Instagram are making. During its recent earnings report, Alphabet said YouTube made just over $15 billion in advertising sales in 2019. Sarah Frier, a reporter at Bloomberg, reported that Instagram made $20 billion last year in ad sales, more than a quarter of Facebook’s total revenue. But YouTube shares its ad revenue with the creators on its platform and Instagram doesn’t, even though both rely on a steady stream of uploads from their users. Frier told host Molly Wood that soon IG creators will want some of that money.