Marketplace Tech

Some 143 million people had their personal information stolen in the Equifax data breach. And that has a lot of us asking: How did we get here? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to Nancy Kim, who teaches internet studies at California Western School of Law, about why regulating data collection is so hard. And we hear from a few New Yorkers about their data security worries — or lack of them.

When a city becomes a tech hub, it usually also becomes a bubble: a housing bubble, a pay bubble and an industry bubble, to name a few. The tech world talks about these bubbles like they’re inevitable. But what if they aren't? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to Seattle-based Glenn Kelman, who is the CEO of the real estate site Redfin, about tech employees’ stock payouts and how reporting them properly could distribute wealth more evenly throughout the country.

When we think space, we often think about observation — watching the skies and figuring out what’s out there. But some people are already thinking about how to put the assets up in space to good use. One way to do that? Asteroid mining. It may sound like science fiction, but established companies such as Caterpillar and startups such as Planetary Resources are putting real money into it. Our two resident space nerds, Molly Wood and Kimberly Adams, talk about this to kick off our series looking at the economics of outer space.

As machine learning becomes more prevalent, the conversation about robots taking our jobs gets more intense. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks to Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, which has been studying technology’s effect on the future of work. He said, robots or not, jobs are changing, and we should shift company culture and benefits along with them.

The federal government provides SNAP benefits, which stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, to those that need financial help to buy groceries. It’s a program that’s has not traditionally been on the cutting edge of tech. In fact, eight states won't even let you apply for benefits online and only a few have apps that let you check your balance. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel, which created the Fresh EBT app. It allows people to check their Electronic Benefits Transfer balance on their phone or computer. Plus, we go shopping with a SNAP benefit recipient and community activist in the South Bronx in New York City.

The iPhone debuted in 2007, and this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced three new ones: iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X. Smartphones have changed how we watch TV, bank and communicate. Almost every industry has been impacted by this technology. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood looks at the companies that won and lost the mobile revolution.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai has made it a priority to increase the availability of broadband internet access across America. The way to do it? Cutting regulations and increasing competition, according to him. He joins us from Washington, D.C. to explain why he thinks a free market will close the digital divide.

Hundreds of companies are racing to build self-driving cars, and one piece of technology is essential to all of their efforts. It's called LiDAR, an acronym that stands for light detection and ranging. It uses lasers to sense distances to an object and turn those distances into a 3-D representation of the environment. So it's how a self-driving car sees the world around it. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood visits Silicon Valley startup Luminar and its founder and CEO, 22-year-old Austin Russell. The company hopes to become the parts provider for automakers for LiDAR self-driving technology.

Hurricane Irma is a Category 5 storm that made landfall in the Caribbean this week and may hit Florida this weekend. The National Weather Service uses National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite images to get a sense of how strong the storm is and where it’s going. However, the Trump administration is proposing budget cuts to those agencies. We discuss the critical images NOAA is capturing and what would happen if meteorologists received degraded satellite imagery.

Venture capital touches all of us in some way, from our retirement portfolios to inventions we use. Yet many of us don't really know how venture capital works. So on Marketplace Tech, we're going to look into that, starting at Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. It's a quiet little office park where hundreds of millions of dollars change hands each year. Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has an office there. He has been working in the industry for more than 20 years and is one of the founding partners of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. We talk with him about the ins and outs of Silicon Valley investing.