Marketplace Tech

All week we're looking at venture capital and the people who control that wealth. We start with the industry's very culture. In November, venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson left that firm following allegations of inappropriate behavior and an internal investigation. The company said he left by mutual agreement. Ellen Pao is a venture capitalist who sued another well-known firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, for gender discrimination in 2012. She lost the case, but it inspired other women to come forward. We revisit Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood's conversation with Pao about how her public battle shined a light on venture capital’s culture. (08/06/2018)

Four of the biggest companies in the world — Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — all reported earnings over the last two weeks. These companies either sell gadgets, services or ads — or maybe a combination of the three. And for a long time, it looked like selling ads, fueled by personal information, was the holy grail of digital business models. But lately, it looks like less of a slam dunk. Is the advertising star dimming as a reliable business model? Marketplace’s Molly Wood decided to ask an investor — Emily Melton, a partner at venture capital firm DFJ.

This weekend in Las Vegas, the huge cybersecurity event Black Hat USA kicks off, followed immediately by the other big cybersecurity event of the year, Def Con.  There are always some big hacker stunts at these events — hackers already broke into a voting machine as a Def Con demonstration. But after a year of major data breaches, there's also a sense of security fatigue. Chester Wisniewski is a principal research scientist at Sophos, a security firm. He talked with Marketplace’s Molly Wood about whether that fatigue is affecting business. (08/02/2018)

Free food is a legendary perk of working at a tech company. The cafeterias at Apple, Google, and Facebook are almost like a tourist attraction. But cities in the San Francisco Bay Area are saying that the free lunches are killing local business, and they're moving to ban company cafeterias. The city of Mountain View made a law in 2014 that said Facebook's new campus couldn't offer free food, and last week, San Francisco city supervisors proposed a rule that any new offices in the city couldn't include cafeterias. Marketplace’s Molly Wood talks with Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, about the proposal. (08/01/2018)

Hackers, probably Russian, successfully broke into electric utilities last summer. Homeland security officials revealed those intrusions for the first time last week. There were also reports last week of attempted cyberattacks on various members of Congress, and this week, the Senate is likely to have a showdown over funding for election security.  There had been a White House cybersecurity coordinator who organized the national response to cyberattacks, but the Trump administration eliminated the job back in May. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Daniel Castro, vice president at the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, about what this means for U.S. cybersecurity. (07/31/2018)

For many people, especially those under 40, paying a friend, or settling a restaurant bill, or squaring up after happy hour isn't done in cash. It's done by peer to peer app.  You've probably heard of PayPal and Venmo, which PayPal owns. Now, there's some competition from Zelle, the big banks' answer to Venmo. Rahul Chadha follows peer to peer mobile banking for the research organization eMarketer.  His firm says Zelle will overtake Venmo this year. One thing that helps?  Zelle comes pre-installed in the mobile apps of many big banks. Chadha spoke with Marketplace's Lizzie O'Leary about whether that's enough to lift Zelle up. (07/30/2018)

In the last installment of our series on the trade-offs of technology, a discussion about screen time. How much is too much? And is there a right kind of screen time and a wrong kind? To answer that, we kind of need to know: What are screens doing to our children's brains? One person studying that is Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin. She'll talk with us on today's show about how media use affects kids. (07/27/2018)

From recommendations to notifications to endless scrolling that never stops giving you something new, today's tech is designed to be irresistible. But some designers of these products now say these techniques are damaging. James Williams is one of those people. He spent 10 years at Google and then co-founded a movement called Time Well Spent, which aims to get tech companies to re-think how they grab and monetize our attention. He’s also the author of the book “Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy.” He talked with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood about the way forward for tech companies.

This week we're looking at the grand bargain of technology with the next generation of users in mind. Today we're looking at how kids deal with the complexity of digital life and how companies could make things easier or safer. Danah Boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft and the founder of the research organization Data & Society, and much of her research looks at how kids are affected by the digital societies they live in. She talked with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood. (07/25/2018)

As part of our series on the grand bargain of tech and what it means for kids, we are taking a look at what happens when children form a bond with the robotic toys and digital assistants in their lives. MIT researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying what happens to empathy when products are designed to make kids get attached to them like a buddy, not a machine. Turkle spoke with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood about how robots and their attempts at empathy affect the kids they’re targeting.