Marketplace Tech

Host Molly Wood spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about China’s battle with its online information about the coronavirus. She says that in critical times, the country tends to slow down the internet, and in some way censor what is being shared online. Some people are able to bypass that censorship, she adds, by using homonyms to successfully post something.

Host Molly Wood spoke with Taylor Lorenz, a tech and internet culture reporter at the New York Times, about the sponsored memes Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg is paying for. Lorenz says that because Bloomberg doesn’t resonate with young voters — like Sanders and Trump — he has to pay social media influencers to advertise his campaign through memes in forms of videos or still images. All of this is allowed, according to Facebook, so long as it’s known to social media users that it’s paid content.

Host Molly Wood spoke with Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit — the parent company of TurboTax — about the company’s recent $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma, its biggest since 1983. The reason for this acquisition, Goodarzi says, is to advance its mission to help families with their savings, while also helping its customers about their financial literacy, like how to keep or improve a great credit score. Since many services on Credit Karma are free, and many on TurboTax are not, Molly asked how the acquisition might change things up for Credit Karma.

Jeff Bezos is putting $10 billion of his personal money into climate solutions. Will that go toward inventing new technologies to deal with the problem or scaling up what we already have? And what will make more of a difference? Host Molly Wood talks about it with Jay Koh, a managing director at the private equity firm The Lightsmith Group.

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.