NEXT with John Koetsier

Apple announced this morning that it has launched two new “radio” stations on Apple Music: Apple Music Hits, and Apple Music Country.

Apple is investing significantly in its Radio product, with major stars and shows that are part talk radio, part Casey Kasem, part podcasting. An important question for stars to ask, however, is how broad an audience they can get by focusing on a single platform versus allowing their shows to appear on every platform simultaneously. 

Or ... if they’re better off opening up their content on a freely available service.

Lama Nachman is an Intel scientist who built Stephen Hawking's communication system. Now she's helping another scientist and roboticist, Peter Scott Morgan, who has Motor Neuron Disease (like ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), to live and communicate with a more advanced version.

It uses gaze control and AI to essentially control a computer that allows him to talk, write, control his environment, and retain some measure of independence. Most of the technology is open source, and the next version, which senses brain waves, only uses a few hundred dollars worth of equipment.

Morgan's vision is using AI and technology to essentially cyborg himself (eventually, perhaps with help of a robotic exoskeleton). Nachman is using AI, including GPT-2, word prediction, and more, to help him communicate. Sometimes the result isn't just him or just the system, but a combination of both.

Should we ban all foreign apps?

President Trump might have a lot of support from Americans who want to do precisely that. In a poll run by TapResearch this week, 30% of American adults said they that the U.S. should ban all foreign social media apps. Another 40% said that the U.S. should ban all apps from countries that have an interest in spying on Americans.

“Our findings show that many people support banning apps developed by foreign companies,” TapResearch says.

Phone calls suck, right? It's always the IRS or your "bank" or some other scam. Well ... can a custom verified caller visual save phone calls? As in a guaranteed way to know who's calling AND WHY before you pick up?

There's just way too much voice spam, so most people don't pick up calls from unknown numbers. 

In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with First Orion CTO Mark Himelfarb about phone spam, verified visual caller IDs, and more. The question is: will it be good enough to save phone calls?

Epic Games, the maker of the hit multi-platform Fortnite game, has sued Apple for anti-competitive behavior, alleging that Apple monopolizes the App Store payments process and gouges developers for 30% of their revenues.

At stake is billions of dollars in revenue for Apple.

And potentially billions for Google too.

“At a market cap of nearly $2 trillion, Apple’s size and reach far exceeds that of any technology monopolist in history,” the lawsuit says. 

In a tech-driven economy, you could argue that developers rule the world. If so, you could argue that Github rules developers, 50 million of whom are on the platform.

3 million organizations too, from NASA's Mars Rover team to enterprises to ... yeah ... me.

In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Jason Warner, the CTO of GitHub, as I interview him for Traction Conference. Things we cover:

- how he started working for IBM because he could "lift heavy things"

- 10X growth (of course)

- how sometimes, the most important stuff is what you do NOT build

- prioritization

- where to start as a non-technical founder?

- finding coworkers, cofounders, and employees

- managing teams

- working remotely

- setting goals

- achieving organizational alignment

- Jason's biggest fear as a leader

- getting unfiltered feedback

- and SO. MUCH. MORE!

Where do Google, Microsoft, and IBM go for training data and data enrichment?

AI is driving innovation, competitive advantage, and speed to market ... but what if you don’t have enough training data? And what if your data is raw, not enriched, and you have no metadata to help your AI engine make sense of it?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Wendy Gonzalez, President and CEO of Samasource, which supplies training data for Google, IBM, Microsoft, and a quarter of the Fortune 50.

Apple’s App Store dominance is under fire like never before, thanks to its own desire for control of its platform, antitrust regulation at home and abroad and the vagaries of an American leader who has signed executive orders faster than any president in history.

Two things in particular are major challenges:

1) Donald Trump’s recent executive order on TikTok owner ByteDance and WeChat owner Tencent

2) Russia’s new Federal Antimonopoly Service ruling against Apple

Both hit at the heart of one of Apple’s current major competitive advantages: the company’s sole control of the App Store. Each does it in an entirely different way. And Apple can only escape the consequences of these moves by opening up the iPhone to “sideloading” apps.

Or, in other words, smashing the single biggest law of the App Store.

Is Apple playing fair?

Apple looks to be giving its own ad network a leg up on competitors with customer data that other ad networks can’t access. In iOS 14, Apple Advertising appears to have a separate settings panel with a default-on setting. Other advertisers and ad networks on iOS, however, need to ask permission every single time.

“It’s preferential access to users’ data,” mobile expert Eric Seufert says. “Now they’re best-positioned to gain market share in mobile app install ads.”

That’s close to an $80 billion industry that Google and Facebook currently dominate.

There’s a new app that can tell your heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, respiration or breathing rate, and mental stress just by taking a short video. Soon, blood pressure is coming too.

Sounds crazy, right?

In the episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we're joined by David Maman, CEO and co-founder of Binah.ai, to find out ...