Tech Talks Daily

Ben Brook's story started when he set out to find out what companies had collected his personal information - and he realized his data was nearly impossible to track, control, or reclaim.

Ben, who is now the founder and CEO of Transcend, raised 25M from Index Ventures and Accel, with participation from South Park Commons, Phil Venables (Board Member and former CISO, Goldman Sachs), and Dylan Field (CEO, Figma), just months after graduating from Harvard.

Since launching, Ben's company has successfully tapped into the swelling interest in data rights, privacy, consumer rights by helping customers such as Paetron, Indiegogo, etc., encode privacy across their tech stack.

Ben had a great idea - give people the rights to their data by making it easy for companies to deliver. With GDPR, CCPA, and 40 different state-level bills in the US pending, this is a major issue for businesses and almost feels like perfect timing. Ben shares his startup story on Tech Talks Daily.

Shiv Gupta, the founder of Incrementors Web Solutions, a Digital Marketing Agency, joins me on Tech Talks Daily. He shares his story, how he crafted his content marketing strategy, and how digital marketing, especially SEO, transformed his life.

We discuss what types of content businesses should be creating for their industry and how to repurpose content in different ways to make it last longer. Shiv also shares tips for your content that sells your products naturally or in a way that comes across as not pushy to the customer.

One of the traditions in the UK is to watch the Queens Christmas Speech on Christmas Day. I thought I would offer an alternative for tech fans where I look at where we are now and what the following year in tech will look like.

Whether it's the concept of fold space in Dune, warp drive in Star Trek, or light speed in Star Wars, sci-fi creators and fans alike have always been intrigued by the idea of moving from one galaxy to another in the blink of an eye. Thanks to Hollywood, we associate the slow stretching of stars, streaks of particles drifting behind the exhaust pipes, and the silent rumble of engines with space ships - but what is the reality of space travel?

Daniel Bock, CEO & Co-Founder at Morpheus Space, joins me on Tech Talks Daily to dig into precisely what Hollywood gets wrong, how far off commercial space travel is, and what the industry needs to do not only to make it viable but to keep ESG at the core of it.

The space entrepreneur also shares his story and how he aims to enable a sustainable and safe future of our planet Earth by seeking new ventures and pushing boundaries. Morpheus Space is disrupting the NewSpace industry by introducing Agile Constellations, a fusion between advanced electric propulsion and Artificial Intelligence.

The solution package enables satellite service providers to operate entire constellations as one entity. Furthermore, with the support of its groundbreaking spacecraft electric propulsion systems, each satellite can perform countless orbital maneuvers, allowing the possibility of "objective first"​ mission planning with an automated trade-off.

All this provides the flexibility of satellite networks exploited by the A.I. to optimally morph the constellations to fulfill the user's objectives, ranging from revisiting frequencies to observing moving POIs.

Overair Inc. - Overair is positioned to be a global leader in advanced air mobility. In August 2021, they announced the design of their revolutionary Butterfly – an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for advanced air mobility. Butterfly is designed to be the most robust, efficient, and quiet aircraft in its class – a mobility workhorse that produces zero carbon emissions in flight.

Overair CEO Ben Tigner talks about Butterfly's technology and how they want to change the way we live, work, and travel.

Embedded finance looks set to radically transform digital businesses and create a new benchmark for customer experience across multiple industries. According to Juniper Research, the embedded finance market will be worth $138 billion by 2026.

In the near future, embedded finance will enable digital businesses to serve SMEs and micro-entrepreneurs worldwide, helping them sell to their core offering and create diversified revenue streams by embedding payments, insurance, lending, and other financial services under the banner of their existing brand.

Innovative businesses are also expected to adopt embedded finance to overcome perennial challenges around handling payments across geographies, currencies, and differing regulatory zones. As a result, they will be able to offer fintech as a service to help clients implement financial services into their own business models.

Frederick Crosby - Chief Revenue Officer at NIUM, joins me in a conversation about the trend towards embedded fintech and how the Nium platform enables banks, payment providers, travel companies, and other businesses to collect and disburse funds in local currencies to over 100 countries.

About Frederick

Frederick is the Chief Revenue Officer at Nium, an advanced global payments platform redefining how consumers and businesses can send, spend, and receive funds around the world. Frederick leads the global Business Development, Marketing, and Communications teams that have helped inform and transform business models for banks, fintechs, and other platforms that needed new payment capabilities in this quickly evolving digital age, and that have made Nium one of the fastest-growing global fintechs in the payment space.

Frederick is a veteran in the cross-border payments and e-commerce space and has catapulted huge global businesses and customer bases at start-ups and enterprise companies alike.

In the early days of PayPal, Frederick unlocked the potential of cross-border e-commerce by aligning eBay/PayPal's massive supply/demand, and providing new functionality for global buyers and sellers to transact. At Western Union, he led a team that transformed digital remittances into the largest growth engine at the company to attain the #1 position in all their global markets.

As CRO at Veem, Frederick joined a pioneering team bent on making global SMB bank payments into a five-minute affair. His sales and marketing teams built a network of over 170K SMBs around the world who could send and receive payments in a click, and the partnership team, in turn, brought the capability into the world's largest small business accounting and e-commerce platforms.

Synergis, a globally focused technology venture capital firm whose existing investments include SMIC, WuXi AppTec, eSign, etc., launched its flagship Venture Fund I earlier this year. In addition to sectors such as SaaS, Biotech, and Consumer, the fund also has a dedicated Crypto/Blockchain strategy that has already allocated to six seed-stage funds and made one direct investment.

Synergis is set to launch Shanghai-based "Synergis LaunchPad" to assist portfolio GPs and companies in expanding founder-sourcing and community-building capabilities throughout Asia.

Jerry Shi is also a crypto evangelist and investor based in Toronto and New York. He institutionalized Synergis Capital with a strong team based on his differentiated model and track record with family assets and managed SPVs. I invited him on the podcast to learn more about his story.

The UK government recently launched data reforms to boost innovation, economic growth and protect the public, a year on from the creation of the National Data Strategy and a key step in its 10 Tech Priorities, which include unlocking the power of data. The proposed reforms aim to empower the ICO and businesses using data in innovative and responsible ways to benefit people's lives, in areas from healthcare to financial services. However, a new report from data analytics leader, Qlik, into the UK's FS industry suggests that while AI and predictive analytics has huge potential in FS organisations, low trust and regulatory fears are still holding back their widespread adoption in the industry.

In fact, Only half (50%) of IT leaders FS organisations trust decisions made by predictive analytics solutions are without bias, 46% of IT leaders believe the regulatory burden outweighs the benefit that predictive analytics solutions could offer.

Richard Spiegal, BI Centre of Excellence Leader at Nationwide, and Adam Mayer, Senior Manager at Qlik join me in a conversation on the state of regulation and trust around data in the financial services (FS) sector.

We discuss how to tackle the issues laid out in Qlik's report, particularly around trust and regulation issues and the power of data analytics to help organisations build a data pipeline and democratise data in a safe, secure way with customers interests at heart.

I also learn how Nationwide is exploring analytics use cases across anti-money laundering, financial crime, risk management, and supporting human decisions, for example, by triaging and helping to prioritise staff caseloads.

A big thank you to the team at Feedspot for featuring Tech Talk Daily on their Best 40 UK Tech Podcasts list.

I recently discovered a Belgian company called Soda who focuses on data quality monitoring and testing. Think of it a bit like application or software monitoring which is now ubiquitous. Soda scans for issues caused by human error, firmware upgrades, schema changes, cross-platform integration snafus, bought data, or transformation bugs.

The aim is to automate, verify, and validate the flow of data from various sources and encourage collaboration between software/data engineers and downstream business decision-makers. The big idea here is to eliminate so-called 'silent data issues.' These are the issues that bubble up (hence the name Soda!) further downstream having gone undetected in datasets. In an era when most companies are moving towards being entirely data-driven, ensuring data is of the optimum quality is critical. I invited Soda CEO and founder Maarten Masschelein on the Tech Talks Daily to learn more. Maarten discusses why data quality monitoring is becoming a hot topic and provides examples of where bad data has caused serious problems. I also learn how Soda was listed as a data management Cool Vendor by Gartner.

It has been remarkable to witness the enterprise transition to the cloud in just a few short years -- but what is next? Multi-cloud networking is the new way for enterprises to manage applications worldwide for dispersed and remote users. Managing applications in the cloud - and through multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) -- can mean a host of benefits, including reduced latency, more affordable transit costs, and heightened security.

However, we are not there yet. Most organizations are still struggling with the complex networking infrastructures needed to achieve "a multi-cloud networking Nirvana." Ramesh Prabagaran, co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, recognized the opportunity for a newer type of infrastructure -- one that would provide enterprises a better way to network to multiple CSPs - a safer, less complex, and more affordable way.

As the former co-founder of Viptela, acquired by Cisco for $610 million in 2017, Ramesh is one of the pioneers in the SD Wan field - and is no stranger to overcoming serious networking challenges. Ramesh and his team at Prosimo have developed a single, vertically integrated infrastructure stack to deliver an application experience that balances performance, security, and costs across multi-cloud environments.

Just months out of stealth, the team has had early success with several enterprise customers, including Flexport, announced partnerships with Google Cloud, AWS, and Verizon, and was recently included in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Networking Software.

Multi-cloud networking is complex and not easy to do or even understand. Still, in today's episode, Ramesh breaks it down and explains it all in a language everyone can understand. He also shares his own story, which involves a series of successes and innovations.