Marketplace Tech

In the past few years, venture capitalists have invested more than $1.6 billion into companies working with low-earth orbit technology. Some of those companies are making small satellites that orbit closer to Earth than traditional ones. The goal: to blanket Earth with broadband internet and gather data on the planet. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to the innovators behind this mission.

Microsoft recently announced that it’s doing away with its Windows Phone operating system. That basically leaves consumers with two options: iPhone or Android. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Julie Ask, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, about how the smartphone industry got here and what it would take for a third player to enter the market.

To find out how your trusted weather app gets its intel, look no further than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Virginia outpost of NOAA has huge disks on its roof that pull in information from the satellites floating in space, and a massive server room where all of the data they collect gets stored and sent out. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams took a tour of the building with Bill Carter, who’s in charge of ground systems and maintenance.

From data breaches to global cyberwarfare, it’s clear cybersecurity isn’t really working. And not even a newly minted MacArthur fellow can tell us why. What he can tell us: Advice like creating long, complicated passwords might not make a big difference in the end. Marketplace Tech’s Molly Wood talks with Stefan Savage about what we can do to make cybersecurity better.

Machines are getting stronger and smarter. They may soon be our competitors and colleagues in the workforce. What would happen if we used them to enhance our own brains? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, about what would happen if artificial and human intelligence met.

It’s safe to say that we’re becoming increasingly afraid of tech. Algorithms and ad platforms are feeding us information we can’t trust, companies are storing and sharing our personal data and robots might be coming for our jobs. Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, is a futurist who wrote the new book “WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.” Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to him about how tech could do better.

The Labor Department released its monthly jobs report on Friday, and in September, for the first time in seven years, we lost jobs — 33,000 of them. But the government isn’t the only entity tracking the workforce. LinkedIn data show that hiring was on the upswing in September. So who’s right here? It turns out, both may be. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Guy Berger, an economist with LinkedIn, about how the company gets its data.

After this week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, both Google and Facebook promoted false news stories about the massacre. Both platforms took down the stories, but not before they were widely shared. Today on Marketplace Tech, we look at how fake news is promoted and why algorithms might not be enough to stop it.

If you had a Yahoo account in 2013, it was hacked. Verizon, which now owns Yahoo, announced this week that all three billion of Yahoo’s accounts were hacked. Yahoo had previously said only one-third of user accounts were affected. Why is the company just figuring this out now? On today’s show, we talk to Chester Wisniewski, a senior security researcher at Sophos, a network security company, about what happened and what you can do if you were affected.

There’s a lot of talk about smart machines taking our jobs. But AI pioneer Andrew Ng thinks we should focus on programming those smart machines in the first place. Ng is the co-founder of the massive online open course company Coursera. This fall, Coursera is offering classes in deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence. We ask Ng: In the future, will the world be split into two kinds of people — those who know how to code and those who don’t?