Marketplace Tech

As facial recognition software spreads, it brings the challenge of diversity along with it. So far, programs identify male, white faces far more accurately than they do black women, for example. A new IBM project aims to change that. Diversity in Faces is a data set of a million faces pulled from public domain pictures on Flickr. It gives computers a lot more to look at and process, and it introduces a way to better measure diversity in faces. John R. Smith is an IBM fellow and lead scientist of Diversity in Faces. He tells Jed Kim that there's nothing else like this. Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

This week, activist shareholders in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, spoke out against development of Google's Dragonfly. That's the internal code name for a project reportedly working on a censored search engine for China. We hear a lot about web censorship in China, but how does it work? What's it like to use? Host Jed Kim talks with Marketplace correspondent Jennifer Pak about it. Now based in Shanghai, Pak has reported from inside China for years. She says censorship is getting stronger. Today's show is sponsored by Nulab  and Indeed.

This week, trade talks continue between the United States and China. U.S. officials complain that China has long failed to protect U.S. intellectual property rights, a charge China rejects. The U.S. wants China to put an end to what's known as "forced technology transfers." That's when U.S. companies have to share their valuable tech secrets with local partners in order to access China's much-coveted market. Finding a solution has been a big sticking point in trade negotiations. And the history of countries sparring over IP issues goes back centuries. Marketplace’s Tracey Samuelson talks with Greg Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He says, in its infancy, the United States took advantage of some stolen tech.

Today's show is sponsored by Topo Athletic, WellFrame and Indeed.

It's Oscar season, a time when we celebrate the history of film. But what if you want to sit down and watch some classics? That was the selling point of one streaming service, FilmStruck, that AT&T recently shuttered. FilmStruck showcased directors like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick. It was the darling of cinephiles for the two years it existed. Given that streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon seem to be focused on making original content, could the golden age of streaming mean that film history falls through the cracks? Jed Kim talks with Ann Hornaday, a senior film critic for the Washington Post, about the death of FilmStruck and the future of classic film. Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

Can we agree that flying these days is kind of the worst? It feels like the changes airlines have made are rarely in our favor. Take smaller seats, narrower aisles and baggage restrictions. Plus, consumers have lost some technological ground. When the Concorde stopped flying more than 15 years ago, we lost access to super fast flights across the ocean. Now some companies are working on ways to bring supersonic travel back for commercial flights within the next decade. They're talking everything from Mach 1, the speed of sound, to many times faster than that. Jed Kim talks with Guy Norris, a technology editor at Aviation Week. He says at Mach 2.2, flights from New York to London would go from six hours long to just under three. He expects we'll see companies ease into this market rather than make a space-age leap. Today's show is sponsored by Indeed, Ultimate Software, Topo Athletic and Lenovo for Small Business.

Over the weekend in Beverly Hills, California, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual Scientific and Technical Oscars ceremony. These awards, handed out two weeks ahead of that "other" Oscars broadcast, are specifically for scientific and technical achievements. This year the academy honored technologies like a security system that lets production teams share raw footage or drafts over the internet without them being stolen or leaked. And, of course, there were awards for motion graphics, 3D modeling, all the things that create incredible visual worlds in the movies. The process of evaluating which technologies warrant awards is the really interesting part. Molly Wood talks with Doug Roble, a visual effects artist and chair of the committee that chooses the winners. He says a whole lot of research goes into every choice. Today's show is sponsored by Kronos, WordPress and Indeed.

The video game Fortnite is a cultural phenomenon that has the whole entertainment industry on notice. Last weekend it took a step toward becoming an even bigger social platform, when it held a live, in-game concert with the electronic music DJ Marshmello. A reported 10 million players watched the concert all at the same time while their virtual characters danced around in the game. There was even in-game merch to buy after the show. Molly Wood talks with Peter Rubin, a senior editor at WIRED, who wrote about the concert and how it was definitely a winner for Marshmello. Today's show is sponsored by WellFrame  and Topo Athletic.

As we saw in tech company earnings over the last couple of weeks, tech giants are making a lot of money in cloud computing. Amazon, Google and Microsoft rent out computer storage and computing power to smaller companies for lots of profit, and they spend a lot of money on the business themselves. "Cloud" is kind of a misleading name because it's really a very expensive physical infrastructure on the ground, lots of powerful computers that live in huge temperature-controlled buildings called data centers. All big tech companies spend a lot on data centers for storage, computer power for artificial intelligence and to deliver services to their customers. And the business is only growing. Molly Wood talks with Rich Miller, the founder and editor of Data Center Frontier, a news site that covers cloud computing and data centers. Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Ultimate Software.

In June, President Donald Trump stuck a gold-colored shovel in a Wisconsin field, breaking ground on an enormous factory for the Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn. The company negotiated nearly $4 billion in tax incentives in exchange for creating 13,000 jobs. But last week Foxconn announced a change in plans. Instead of hiring manufacturing workers to make flat-screen TVs, it would shift to research and development and engineering. A few days later, another surprise. After a talk with Trump, the company said it would go back to manufacturing. Sruthi Pinnamaneni has been following this back and forth for the podcast "Reply All." Marketplace’s Tracey Samuelson asked her what she has heard from Mount Pleasant, the Wisconsin village where this massive plant is supposed to be built.

Today's show is sponsored by Avery Publishing, WellFrame and Evident.

In the last week alone, digital media outlets have laid off hundreds of people. The publishers of USA Today are fighting off a takeover attempt. The Washington Post ran a Super Bowl ad about how important journalism is. But subscriptions don't make enough money and ads are annoying, data-sucking and don't even work most of the time. Enter tech. Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of the payments and processing giant Square. He's got a startup called Invisibly that's part micro-payments where you pay for individual articles and part ad tech where you, the reader, can earn free articles by trading more data. Choose to pay for no ads at all or strike a balance somewhere in the middle. McKelvey told Molly Wood the whole point is control. Today's show is sponsored by Avery Publishing, Kronos  and Lenovo for Small Business.