Marketplace Tech

Here at Marketplace, we're doing a yearlong project on the 10-year anniversary of the financial crisis called Divided Decade. At the center of it, of course, were dodgy housing loans that were packaged and resold as seemingly solid investments. They were known as mortgage-backed securities. Here's where the tech comes in: Back in the '90s, a guy named Michael Osinski and his wife, Isabel, wrote software that made it super simple to bundle loans into a security. Osinski retired from Wall Street eight years before the recession to farm oysters on Long Island, where he rode out the financial collapse with few ill effects on his life. Marketplace producer Eliza Mills met Osinski at his oyster beds to hear his story of making a tool that bankers used to bundle bad loans. She shares what she learned with Molly Wood. (09/17/18)

New digital copyright laws pushed forward by the European Parliament this week would make platforms like Google, Facebook and YouTube share more of their profits with creators, news organizations, musicians and artists. The laws would make them be more aggressive about filtering copyrighted material. But critics, including YouTubers, say the law is so broad that it could lead to widespread censorship and even kill off internet memes. Host Molly Wood talks through the issues with Joanna Plucinska, a tech reporter for Politico Europe. (09/14/18)

We are still at least 15 years away from the first human mission to Mars — that’s at the earliest. But that hasn't stopped Hollywood from skipping ahead to the future. Hulu, the online streaming service, is out with a new series Friday called "The First." It's set in the 2030s, and as the name implies, it imagines what that first mission might be like. In addition to getting the astrophysics right, the show producers had to get the future right. And for that they called a futurist. Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, usually helps businesses with strategy. But from time to time, she consults on films or shows set in the future. One of the questions she had to answer on “The First”: Will smartphones still be around in 15 years? She talks about it with Molly Wood. (09/13/18)

Most people are looking at the new iPhones and thinking about the camera performance, the size of the screen, the notch situation. But we nerds here at Marketplace Tech will be thinking about the semiconductor. Many people will probably ignore the part in Apple's new gadgets announcement Wednesday about the A12 processor and what a big difference it's going to make for speed, performance and battery life. But these guts are actually what set Apple apart — and ahead — of other smartphone makers, because Apple designs its own semiconductors for all its mobile devices. Anshel Sag is a semiconductor analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Molly Wood asks him what the benefits are of making your own chips. (09/12/18)

Insurance is, as the tech industry likes to say, ripe for disruption. It's old, inefficient, and not consumer-friendly. But can a startup with no experience really be a better option? Lemonade Insurance Company lets you buy renter's or homeowner's insurance through an app. An automated bot named Maya guides you through the process. And when you've got a claim,  you take it to Maya, too. It's billed as insurance for millennials and urban dwellers. There are a lot of companies like Lemonade, trying to make insurance more efficient, or even likable. There’s even a name for it: Insurtech. Molly Wood talks to Daniel Schreiber, co-founder and CEO of Lemonade. (09/11/18)

For lots of popular YouTubers, merchandise is the key to making real money. And 24-year-old Karina Garcia is like the fairy-tale merch story. She was a waitress who dropped out of college and then made her first crafty DIY YouTube video in 2015. Now she's got more than 7 million subscribers, and if your kids are begging you to make slime at home, she's why. Garcia launched the slime phenomenon in 2016 with fun variations like bubble wrap slime and glitter. She told CNBC that her business makes about $2 million a year. Now she's got a line of at-home craft kits under the Craft City brand at Target. As part of Marketplace Tech's coverage of the growing "creator economy" of online and social media stars, Molly Wood talks with Garcia about making the move from the screen to the store. (09/10/18)

It's been one year since Equifax announced a giant hack four months after criminals stole the sensitive, personal information of more than 147 million people. And in that year, not a whole lot has changed. No federal data breach notification laws, no big changes to how credit agencies collect information or tell you what they're collecting. Equifax’s stock is almost back up to where it started. One thing that has happened — Equifax has spent $200 million beefing up its security. That was part of a deal with eight states that let it avoid fines in exchange for protecting our data better. We dig into this in Quality Assurance, the Friday segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Molly talks with Lily Hay Newman, a security reporter for Wired. (09/07/18)

Facebook is still trying to convince lawmakers and the public that it's making its business more transparent. But new research suggests the message isn't getting through. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans really don’t understand why they see what they see in their news feeds. Molly Wood talks about the poll with Aaron Smith, associate director of research on internet and technologies issues at Pew. (09/06/18)

Ephemeral marketing is a big trend in social media advertising. You may know it as “stories.” Snapchat started the idea with short video or picture updates that disappear after 24 hours. Instagram copied the feature successfully, and this summer announced it had 400 million daily users on Instagram Stories. Over a million brands are creating Instagram Stories, and according to numbers Facebook released back in May, agencies are investing about 8 percent of their digital marketing budgets in the form. Kate Talbot is a marketing consultant who wrote a book on using Snapchat for business in 2016. Marcus Collins is chief consumer connections officer at the Doner advertising agency. Both tell Molly Wood that branded stories are a hit with audiences, and their disappearing act increases the appeal. (09/05/18)

Facebook, Twitter and Google have been invited to Capitol Hill to testify Wednesday in hearings about possible bias on their platforms. The companies have all been pledging to do better in recent months. But their platforms have been used, in some cases, to undermine democracy, incite violence and spread hate speech, among other ills. Jane McGonigal is a game developer and researcher at the Institute for the Future. That group, partnered with others, just released an online toolkit that they call an “ethical operating system.” It includes questions and exercises to help aspiring Googles and Facebooks “not be evil.” Molly Wood spoke with McGonigal about how it could help tech companies create more ethical products. (09/04/18)