NEXT with John Koetsier

Digital security sucks, and it’s about to get much worse. The question is: can quantum computing save us?

In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Quantropi CEO James Nguyen, who has built the world's first non-photonic quantum key distribution over the Internet. He says that quantum computing is the next foundation of computing, period. And functioning, fast cryptography will open up our ability to use it, just like the internet unlocked PCs in the 90s.

At stake? $100 trillion in annual commerce. Global national security. Safety in internet of things devices. Medical privacy. And much, much, more.

Episode links:

TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/

A new startup out of Harvard Labs has invented a way to print camera lenses 5,000 at a time just like computer chips, and in the same semiconductor foundries that make our computer’s CPUs. They’re 100X thinner than standard smartphone camera lenses, are simpler and cheaper to make, sense the full electromagnetic spectrum — not just visible light — and have excellent 3D-sensing capabilities that could bring Lidar-based dimensional sensing functionality that’s currently only on high-end phones like the iPhone 12 to smartphones across the price spectrum.

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I interview Metalenz co-founder Rob Devlin.

Could you learn trigonometry in 3 weeks if your life depended on it?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Josh Carroll, who volunteered with the US Army after 9/11 before he finished high school,  did 3 tours of duty in Afghanistan, then came back and worked, among other jobs, as a high school janitor.

In the library of the high school he was cleaning he found A Brief History of Time, by Dr. Stephen Hawking, and rediscovered his love of science. Then he taught himself advanced math via YouTube on his path to becoming a physicist ...

Want more?

Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Biden’s Peloton vs national security: what’s risky about the president of the US using a Peloton or a Fitbit? And ... what does that mean for the rest of us?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with ex-googler Ben Barokas, founder and CEO of Sourcepoint, who is now running a privacy-focused company for, as he puts it "the sins" of his prior jobs in adtech.

Can forests be banks? 

A new venture capital group is buying forests and wetlands. But they’re not cutting down the trees or starting farms ... they’re monetizing nature by selling carbon offsets, and looking to see increased value in the underlying assets.

The goal for land owners? The ability to do nothing while making money. In other words, NOT cutting down the trees, NOT putting in a mine, NOT draining the wetlands. The goal for businesses and people? The ability to buy carbon offsets ... and invest in the bank of nature.

Full transcript coming at:

Imagine a "rocket" that only uses electricity.

Have a ragtag group of physicists and engineers exploited a little-known feature of Einstein's equations to built a true propellant-less space drive that doesn't require reaction mass ... just electricity?

James Woodward, physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, thinks so. NASA has funded new research into it, and the result if successful would be the ultimate EV ... an electric vehicle that not only can propel a space ship to the planets and the stars, but also lift off out of gravity wells like Earth's.

PewDiePie is the top creator on YouTube, with over 107M subscribers and 26B views. Now he’s coming to Facebook, and we’re chatting with the cofounder of the company making it happen.

Jellysmack is an influencer platform whose creators have a combined 10 billion monthly video views and reaches 125M unique viewers just in the United States. Co-founder Michael Philippe chats with us about bringing PewDiePie to the platform: why, how, what content, what's changing, what's not, and who he thinks PewDiePie's fans will be on Facebook.

We also chat about the changing media/creator/influencer landscape, and what this is growing into.

We’re in a crazy, complex, almost alternate reality now. We see hacking from nation-states, hacking from criminals, hacking for fun, hacking for profit ... and there's probably worse that we don't see.

In that context, how does a Chief Information Security Officer function? We chat with Twitter's CISO Rinki Sethi and Info-Tech Research Group analyst Frank Sargent about information security in 2021.

Topics:

 - Russia

 - SolarWinds Orion and Supernova hacks

 - Big tech

 - Social engineering

 - US elections

Most importantly, we talk about the stakes if we don't get this right ... to our power systems, to our government processes, to our military secrets, and to the companies that run the infrastructure that our lives depend on.

Intel's Loihi chip is a neuromorphic chip which tries to emulate the human brain. As far as we've come with convention computing, we are still way behind tiny organisms like insects and birds at understanding the world and adapting to it.

Now Intel is applying neuromorphic computing to autonomous drones: drones that can fly themselves at high speed in challenging, obstacle-filled environments. To do, essentially, what birds and bats and even tiny-brained insects can already do with ease. How? Partially, thanks to the Loihi chip,  which implements probabilistic computing to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in in the natural world. 

We chat with Mike Davies, who leads Intel's neuromorphic computing lab about how it all works ...

Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

My guest works at Intel: https://www.intel.com/

And you can watch the full video on my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/c89S-oV-H1U 

The internet of things sounds great, but has huge issues. Ubiquity is one. Battery power is another. Cost of sensors -- and sensing tech to sense the sensors -- is another.

But perhaps ... we're about to solve all the problems.

Wiliot makes a super-smart ARM-based chip with onboard sensors that harvests energy from environmental radio waves to enable battery-free IoT. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I interview Stephen Statler, a senior VP at Wiliot.

The chip uses a custom-built operating system operating on nanowatt power and communicates to the cloud via standard Bluetooth. Cost looks to be an order of magnitude cheaper than RFiD.

We chat about what it can sense, how it works, what the use cases are, and much more.

Links:

 - transcript: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

 - Wiliot: https://www.wiliot.com/

 - Stephen Statler's podcast, Mr Beacon: https://www.mister-beacon.com