Minnov8

Yep…you read that headline right. After nearly NINE YEARS this week’s show is our last podcast as the Minnov8 Gang.

It’s been a great ride. We’ve had an incredible amount of fun, talked to literally dozens of guests, interviewed Minnesota technology leaders, attended hundreds of events, and covered Minnesota technology innovation in all its forms. It is time, however, for us to ride off in to the sunset as we head toward new opportunities and adventures.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

This week’s show was recorded at Minnebar, an enormous gathering of techies in Minnesota. Our guest is Adrienne Peirce (LinkedIn), Product Owner at Leadpages and President of Minne*, the organization responsible for Minnebar and Minnedemo.

Hosts: Steve Borsch and Phil Wilson (Tim Elliott is off)

This past week a Minnesota judge signed a search warrant for anyone who did a Google search for someone who defrauded an Edina bank. Besides being outrageously broad as a warrant—anybody who searched on this guy’s name for legitimate reasons would be under suspicion and could be brought in for questioning—is likely violating our Constitution’s 4th amendment against unreasonable searches. Even Forbes magazine picked up the story but few other outlets have…yet.

Of course, if this would be allowed we could go through Tim Elliott’s underwear drawer and who knows what we’d find?  

We talk about this judge’s warrant, and mostly technology of course, on this week’s podcast.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

Minnesota’s own big box tech retailer, Best Buy, sees its Geek Squad in the news since the FBI Used Best Buy’s Geek Squad To Increase Secret Public Surveillance. Are Geek Squad people really being used as spies? Unfortunately it certainly seems so.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

We cover the Minnesota tech stories of the week including disappointing earnings from both Target and Best Buy over the holiday period. Can they compete with Amazon and other online sources? We have a few ideas. Later we discuss the Amazon S3 outage, Uber’s use of tech to evade law enforcement and Google’s rapid rise in the education market at the expense of Apple.

Hosts: Tim Elliott, Phil Wilson and Julio Ojeda-Zapata (Steve Borsch is off this week)

Gang Mentality: Can Apple compete with Google’s rise in the education market?

Several good tech stories this week but, once again, we dust-off our “Gang Mentality” segment to ponder a question after the president of the United States inaccurately calls out major news organizations as “fake”. That question is: Will technology provide the answer to real vs. fake news, or will it take human intervention?

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

Gang Mentality: Will technology provide the answer to real vs. fake news, or will it take human intervention?

Are you a U.S. citizen? Then you should know that, if you travel internationally, when you come back to the U.S. you may be forced to reveal your device passwords (e.g., smartphone, tablet, laptop) as well as providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers with passwords to your social media and other accounts.

Farfetched? Nope…read this article to get one tech guy’s perspective on what happened this past week to a NASA guy who is a U.S. citizen: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you.

Update: Here is the Department of Homeland Security Privacy Impact Assessment for the Border Searches of Electronic Devices (PDF) which, by the way, has not been updated since 2009.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

Tim and Steve could only imagine what it would be like if Phil Wilson was an advisor to Donald Trump. Would we all have healthcare? Would he build a wall around Lakeville where Tim lives? We can only speculate, but let’s not, and instead go on and talk about technology!

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

We discuss the top Minnesota and other tech stories, but our guest this week is none other than Chuck Olsen, a new media entrepreneur who continues to be involved with cutting edge tech.

This time Chuck’s virtual reality firm, Visual VR, Inc., created an augmented reality character named Rosa, the world’s first virtual activist. She’s a 50ft tall woman “standing up for women everywhere“, and was first delivered publicly so as to “embody every woman who could not participate” and display their messages on Rosa’s sign during the Women’s March in Washington D.C. on January 21st, 2017 (see photos below).

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson

Co-Founder and CEO, Visual VR, Inc.

Photo gallery of I Stand With Rosa. Taken 1/21/2017 in Washington D.C. Photos from Chuck’s account

It is obvious to people who are aware of mass surveillance that we all are being watched. Anything digital is swept up, made Google-like searchable, connected to others and also events, regardless whether those connections are relevant or not.

We talk about our usual Minnesota tech stories but in our other top tech stories was one that caught our attention about Lavabit’s Ladar Levinson launching a new encrypted email service that is better than the original once used by Edward Snowden. Since email is usually core to how and what we communicate, obtain password resets, archive email attachments and much more that we want to keep secure from the government OR from companies that can scan our email (e.g., Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail), protecting our private and confidential communications is critical in this time of mass surveillance.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson