Marketplace Tech

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.

Today the Impossible Burger 2.0 arrives in restaurants around the country. The company Impossible Foods won all kinds of "best of CES" awards at the big tech show in Las Vegas last month for creating a plant-based meat replacement that smells, tastes and looks like real beef. There's also all kinds of science going into growing meat from real meat cells. Molly Wood speaks with Larisa Rudenko, biotechnology expert and visiting scholar in emerging technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She says climate change, animal welfare and human health are all driving huge investment in meat-replacement technologies. Today's show is sponsored by Kronos, Pitney Bowes and Mozilla Firefox.

A busy week in Facebook news: One report said it was paying people to use a research app that sucked up basically all the activities on their phone. That got Facebook in huge trouble with Apple. Meanwhile, two senators were demanding answers about kids buying things on Facebook without their parents' knowledge. Then, on Wednesday, the company reported its earnings and... they were fantastic. The number of users everywhere, including in the U.S., was up, along with increased ad revenue. A tech reporter for The New York Times, Mike Isaac covers all of these stories. Molly Wood asks him if it’s possible people just actually don't care about their privacy after all.

Today's show is sponsored by Triple Byte_JD and Evident.

The United States and several other countries have made it clear that they don't want hardware from Chinese telecom giant Huawei to be part of future fifth-generation wireless networks. They're worried that Huawei could install back doors in a 5G network that could let the Chinese government, companies or hackers spy on information crossing that network. But no matter who is building a 5G network, there will be cybersecurity threats. So who's in charge of making sure that protection against hacking, spying or other cyberthreats is built in from the ground up? Molly Wood talks with Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017. He's now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He says the government should be in charge. Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

Apple released its earnings Tuesday afternoon, and although it met its lowered expectations, revenue from iPhones was down 15 percent over the same quarter last year, and the future trend is still down. For years, Apple's smartphone strategy has been to make premium devices with a premium price tag. The starting price is basically $1,000 for a new flagship iPhone. But those prices are hard to swallow in China and India, markets Apple is depending on to grow its global market share. Even here in the United States, consumers aren't upgrading their phones as much as they used to. Molly Wood talks with Julie Ask, principal analyst at Forrester Research, about whether Apple can keep commanding such high prices. Today's show is sponsored by Kronos, the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and Lenovo for Small Business.

One of the major challenges of using renewable energy like wind or solar is that there's overproduction. The sun shines and the wind blows mostly during the day but then drops off at night — when people tend to use the most power. Batteries can help smooth out those peaks and valleys, but cost has limited wider adoption. Now battery storage is maturing as an industry. So what does that mean for regular people? Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks with Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, who says the tech is getting to houses through transmission lines, maybe even yours.

Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and WellFrame.

Social media was invented to keep up with friends, but if you're fed up with data leaks and privacy concerns, you might decide to quit. It turns out social media may not even need you to know you, because your friends and their posts are pretty good indicators of who you are. In a new study, scientists took to Twitter and found people who interacted regularly. By analyzing the tweets of just eight or nine of a user's friends, they could predict the kinds of things the original user would post. Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks with Jim Bagrow, a professor at the University of Vermont who led the study.

Today's show is sponsored by the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and Triple Byte.

Many people are still active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram despite digital privacy concerns. But even if you set out to truly understand all the information tech companies have about you, it's close to impossible to get your hands on all of the data. Witness the plight of one American professor who's waging a multiyear legal battle against political data firm Cambridge Analytica, trying to see what it collected, bought and sold about him. It's a David and Goliath story, and in this case, David is David Carroll, a media design professor in New York. Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks about Carroll's quest with Issie Lapowsky, a senior writer at Wired.

Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

Each year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development asks local governments to count the number of homeless people in their areas. The task on the ground falls to officials partnered with nonprofits and volunteers. The data is required if you want federal dollars to address homelessness. The count includes those staying in shelters and transitional housing, but in odd-numbered years, like this one, people also go out on the streets to count the homeless population sleeping on sidewalks and in cars. It's a massive undertaking, especially in regions with high levels of homelessness, like Southern California. This year, some areas near Los Angeles are using an app to improve the quality of data they collect. It's a big change from the pen and paper method still used by most. Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks with Jill Replogle, the Orange County reporter for Southern California Public Radio. The O.C. is one of the places using the new tech, and she joined the count and downloaded the app to see how it works.

Today's show is sponsored by the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and WellFrame.

In 2018 venture capital firms invested $130 billion in private companies — an all-time high. Sounds like a thriving startup ecosystem, right? The movie industry similarly hit a new high in 2018... because ticket prices were way higher and people paid more to go to a few big blockbusters. A similar thing happened with venture capital: Firms invested a lot of money in a few big blockbuster companies, like $1.3 billion in Fortnite maker Epic Games, or they made big investments in so-called "unicorn" companies with billion-dollar valuations, such as Uber or Airbnb or Pinterest. How is this pattern changing the landscape for smaller startups? Molly Wood talks with Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of the National Venture Capital Association, about where all the money is going.

Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and WellFrame.