Marketplace Tech

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.

The coronavirus in China is having a large impact on the economy and on many travelers — businesses, factories and stores are shut. With so many people staying home quarantined, they’re going online to entertain themselves. Health and fitness apps are seeing surges in downloads, but it’s video games that have seen the real leap in popularity. The strategy simulation game Plague Inc. jumped recently to the top of Apple’s App Store for games in China. Jack Stewart spoke with Marketplace’s media reporter Jasmine Garsd, who said it’s one that’s eerily similar to the real-life situation that people are finding themselves in.

An in-depth report last month looked at climate disinformation online and found that YouTube was spreading videos through its recommendation, or watch next, algorithms. Many of these videos are slick and professional, making them seem credible. Not only are these videos popping up to the top of recommended queues of YouTube’s billions of users, but they’re wrapped in regular ads from big-name companies who are unwittingly funding this disinformation. Jack Stewart spoke with David Roberts of Vox about the problems YouTube faces in deciding how to police these videos.

This week gave us a spectacular tech failure with the Shadow Inc. app that basically ruined the Iowa presidential caucuses. But tech failures aren’t always considered a bad thing in Silicon Valley. There’s a mantra here — fail fast — that suggests you should try things quickly as an entrepreneur and move on to the next thing with lots of great lessons in hand. Host Molly Wood speaks with Arielle Pardes, a senior writer at Wired, about how tech companies, even the small startups, should plan for failure.

Here’s what we know about what happened earlier this week at the Iowa presidential caucuses. The Iowa Democratic Party hired Shadow Inc., a startup company, that built an app that clearly hadn’t been tested well enough before it was deployed in the real world. Host Molly Wood spoke with Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT and a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and asked him what parts of the voting process do need tech innovation?

The company known mostly for its short-term rentals wants an even bigger share of the roughly $180 billion tours and activities industry. Airbnb just hired a former top Disney executive to run its Experiences business, all while it’s gearing up for an IPO expected later this year and grappling with concerns about safety and fraud. Marketplace’s Amy Scott spoke with Aric Jenkins, a staff writer at Fortune, about Airbnb’s challenges ahead of its potential IPO.

As it turns out, there are jobs where a human touch is — or has been — irreplaceable, like fruit picking. Soft, delicate fruits must be assessed for ripeness and then gently plucked without smooshing. But in Britain, one looming effect of Brexit is a shortage of cheap human labor, which has spawned a new flurry of interest in robots that can do the job.