NEXT with John Koetsier

Who knew, but maintaining state and level of progress on massive construction jobs is actually a really hard problem. Exyn Technologies has adapted their mine mapping level 4 autonomous drones to work on construction sites and feed completion data into construction software packages.

In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Nader Elm and COO Ben Williams.

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When will we solve the “last-mile” problem of robotics? We’ve made robots that can go to the bottom of the ocean, that can operate in hard radiation in a melted-down reactor, and can go to Mars, fly or drive around, do basic science ... and so much more that humans can’t ...

But so many of our robots can’t do the simplest things humans take for granted, like pick up objects, handle them, move them, and work on them. Or identify by touch if an object is a flower or a nail.

It’s kind of the last mile of robotic capability

A company that’s building undersea robots for the Navy is working on exactly this problem. 

In this TechFirst we chat with Jorgen Pedersen, who built RE2 Robotics in Pittsburgh, sold his company to Sarcos, and now serves as COO of the combined company.

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Sometimes you need a big drone. Sometimes a small one will do. Some deliveries are urgent. Others are far away. For each, a slightly different drone would be the optimal solution. That's why Google sister company and Alphabet portfolio company Wing has built an 'aircraft library' ... a vault of drone types it can pull out and get in the air relatively quickly.

In this Techfirst , we chat with Wing CEO Adam Woodworth about the company's 'aircraft library,' about drone development, about what drones will do to the delivery ecosystem, and about the future of Wing.

Questions we address:

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Data is the nuclear waste of the web and machine learning, Ghostery CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz tells me in the last TechFirst podcast. And big tech is redefining privacy to suit their business and cut out their competitors ... not to actually deliver privacy to people.

Today, our identities are as much digital as physical, maybe more. We are where we surf, what we watch, the apps we use, the games we play, the people we engage with on social.

So privacy is a big deal and getting bigger. That's true legislatively, especially in Europe, but also technologically. Big tech has been very eager to share how privacy sensitive it is: Apple has molded its whole brand around privacy, introducing App Tracking Transparency, and Facebook is keen to say you can trust us now … we’re Meta. Google is introducing Privacy Sandbox for web and Privacy Sandbox for Android, and killing the third-party cookie … the bit of data that websites you DON’T visit can put in your browser and track you around the web.

But they all have their own definitions of privacy, which often don’t mean you giving them less data … just their competition. And Ghostery says that Google’s Manifest V3 update to Chrome will break anti-tracking and ad-blocking services.

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Plantiga makes sensor insoles for shoes that help people get better, faster, and healthier. They track how you run, walk, jump, and change direction, and Olympic gold medallist and on of the world’s fastest humans Andre de Grasse is a customer.

But smart soles might just be the first step on the path the Human OS, which takes data from your wrist (smartwatch), finger (smart ring), body (smart clothes), face (smart glasses), and also, likely, smart insoles for data on you feet ...

In this TechFirst we chat with Plantiga CEO Quin Sandler about what his company is building.

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Programming robots is so 2010. Providing the AI framework within with they can teach themselves is accelerating training and development of new behaviors from 100 days to 3 hours.

In this TechFirst, we meet 2 of the researchers behind making MIT's mini-Cheetah robot learn to run ... and run fast. Professor Pulkit Agrawal and grad student Gabriel Margolis share how fast it can go, how it teaches itself to run with both rewards and "punishments," and what this means for future robots in the home and workplace.

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When you plunk a $100 million wind farm down on 98,000 acres of varying terrain, you want to know a few things. You want to know that you’re optimizing the location of your multi-million-dollar turbines. You want to know that the turbines you source can handle the gustiest gust of wind they will ever encounter without shattering dramatically in a viral video. And you want to test potential uses cases and changes in software, which is cheap and changeable, rather than in hardware, which is expensive and hard to edit.

Which is why Siemens Gamesa, the global renewable energy company, is working with NVIDIA to generate AI-powered digital twins of its turbines.

In this TechFirst, I chat with Dion Harris, Lead Product Manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA and Greg Oxley, Siemens Gamesa.

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Everyone wants privacy. Most of us also care about an environment in which businesses can grow too. But can both of these be reconciled?

If you are in the mobile app or marketing spaces, you know that over the past year there’s been a great disturbance in the force. Apple increased privacy regulations for apps, and that essentially killed how apps measured their growth, discovered new audiences, or sent you a reminder that those shoes you were going to buy are still in your cart.

Facebook complained this would hurt small business, took out big ads in the WSJ, and then life sort of went on and most of us forgot about it. But not those in the business.

Growth slowed and profitability went down: 40% down.

Now one company says they’ve solved it: figured out a way to drive growth via advertising that’s completely privacy-safe and Apple-compliant, but almost as good as the old days of abundant data.

In this TechFirst, I chat with Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv.

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We desperately need more housing that is affordable, sustainable, and mass producible. Geoship thinks they've created exactly that, and have now actually built a full-scale prototype using their advanced materials science and construction methodology.

In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO and cofounder Morgan Bierschenk.

Way too many can’t afford homes right now, especially young people, and the homes we do build are generally horrible for the environment. Plus, the isolated wood boxes we build for people don’t tend to bring us closer together.

Geoship is building sustainable bioceramic domes. They're non-toxic, have a near-zero carbon footprint, are and designed to last 500 years. They’re also intended to be affordable, mass producible, and maybe even to be deployed in communities where people can live together, not apart.

Sounds idealistic? Maybe.

But the company has completed its first full-size prototype, has 500 orders, and is looking to enter full-scale production.

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Mojo Vision has been working on smart contact lenses since years. Recently the company announced its most advanced prototype ever, which VP Steven Sinclair told me has "all the elements that we need ... in a working system so that we can really push forward what we hope is the first product."

That includes:

- 14,000 pixels per inch MicroLED display

- 5GH ultra-low latency radio to stream AR content

- continuous eye tracking via custom-configured accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers

- medical-grade in-lens batteries

- eye-controlled user interface

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Sinclair about the technology, uses, augmented reality, timeline to purchasable product, and the fundamental breakthroughs Mojo had to make before achieving this latest prototype.

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