Tech Talks Daily

Competition is on the rise, advertising costs are going up, and target market buying habits are changing. For you to evolve and adapt quickly, you need to be testing. You need to test fast, and you need to test often to grow and scale effectively. Your website might look great, but is it optimized and delivering results? Increasing your online sales isn't a matter of closing your eyes, throwing a dart, and hoping you hit the bullseye. There's a proven, methodical, and scientific process for creating an online sales engine that predictably and continually increases your profits, month after month and year after year. But I wanted to learn more about the technology that makes it all possible. Today's guest is Justin Christianson. He is a self-proclaimed numbers junkie and a digital marketing veteran. Not to mention a Father, Husband, and #1 Bestselling author of "Conversion Fanatic: How to double your customers, sales and profits with A/B testing". Justin is also the co-founder and President of Conversion Fanatics, a full-service conversion rate optimization company, helping companies like Burt's Bees, Dr. Axe, and many others improve their results.

Justin shares tips on marketing growth, conversation optimizations, user experience optimization, scaling, starting/growing/managing a business, eCommerce marketing, and analytics-driven marketing. You can learn more about Justin at http://conversionfanatics.com/.

Dronamics, the world's leading middle-mile cargo drone developer and operator, recently unveiled the first five airports in its European network of cargo droneports. The Dronamics European Droneport Network is the world's first cargo droneport network. It includes private airports and airport groups operating more than 35 airports in 11 European countries, connecting 300 million people with low-cost same-day cargo service.

The company will operate same-day flights within the network using its proprietary "Black Swan" large cargo drones, each with a capacity of 350 kg and range of up to 2,500 km, reducing time, cost and emissions by up to 80% compared to traditional air cargo. Svilen Rangelov, Co-Founder and CEO of Dronamics, shares his mission to enable same-day air deliveries for every single person on the planet at a cost that everyone everywhere can afford. I learn more about how this Bulgarian startup wants to reinvent e-commerce with its cargo drone and how drone technologies can help supply chains become lockdown-proof during the pandemic

When something goes wrong, tech teams don't have the luxury of logging a support ticket. When I heard about Peritus, an AI recommendation for technical support, I felt compelled to find out more.

Robin Purohit is the co-founder and CEO of Peritus.ai, a Bay area startup that is tackling technical support for developers and engineers. He was previously a senior executive at BMC and HP Software, where he led multi-billion dollar business units for IT management, application delivery, and security.

AI chatbots for customer support are getting significant attention and investment in industries ranging from retail to financial services to employee help desks. However, an important area neglected is support for engineers and developers who are driving IT innovation.

These technical users have little patience for pre-wired chatbots without industry context and view opening a support ticket as the last resort. Instead, they look for insights from trusted experts on Community Forums, such as Stack Overflow or vendor-sponsored communities. When done well, community forums can create both user loyalty and deflect costly support cases.

Peritus, an AI recommendation engine for support automation, recently announced the results of its first IT Industry Forum Benchmark that examined over 12 million posts and responses on over 50 leading IT industry forums for vendors and open source technologies such as Cisco, MongoDB, and Kubernetes.

The benchmark study zeroed in on four key metrics:

1. The number of posts that were resolved
2. How quickly the average length to resolve each post was resolved.
3. Whether posts were resolved by the first response,
4. How many experts answered the bulk of the questions.

How secure are your passwords? Have you ever used the same password on more than one website or app? If one of those sites suffers a breach, hackers will attempt to use the exact details on popular websites such as NETFLIX, Amazon. PayPal etc.

An average person has 70-80 passwords. A strong password's key aspects are length, a mix of letters (upper and lower case), numbers, and symbols, no ties to your personal information, and no dictionary words. Nobody can remember them all, and it's not safe to write them all down.

In today's episode, I explore online security fails and how to avoid them. Gary Orenstein is the CCO of Bitwarden, a password management app that embodies the password security for all mindset.

It's the only open-source solution focused on enterprise AND individuals: Source code transparency means it is easy to review, audit, and contribute to the Bitwarden codebase, keeping it secure under the world's watchful eyes.

Gary shares tips for businesses to seamlessly transition to using a password manager and how to outsmart phishing scams. We also discuss how both individuals and companies.

Did you know that a high percentage of missed school days in emerging markets are due to dental problems caused by poor dental care practices? Or, that 90 percent of global health problems, including COVID-19, would be solved if all of us washed our hands seven times a day?

In this podcast, Thomas Serval, CEO of Baracoda Group, discusses how health issues can be prevented through daily care and wellness practices. His company is creating new smart objects for the bathroom—mirrors, bathmats, toothbrushes, and so on—connected by an open operating system, CareOS. The smart bathroom ecosystem Baracoda and its partners are developing is privacy-first, but the data and insights generated can help people proactively prevent diseases and support better health practices over the long-term.

We talk about Thomas' 17 years of experience at CES, where Baracoda has consistently introduced award-winning daily healthtech innovations. This year marks the fifth year in a row of garnering CES Innovation Awards.

At this year's virtual event, Baracoda unveiled the Themis smart mirror, named a CES 2021 Innovation Awards Honoree. Themis provides a privacy-first wide range of health and wellness capabilities: skin analysis, product recommendations, makeup and beard tutorials, daily temperature checks, smart alerts, fertility cycle reminders, and more—all in a compact form factor with a 10-inch screen at an accessible price. The company also showcased Baracoda BBalance, the smart bathroom mat that checks weight, balance, and posture—also a CES 2020 Innovation Awards Honoree.

Not many people think of the bathroom as the hub of preventative health practices, but this enlightening podcast will change your mind. New connected objects can help you spot suspicious moles that might signal skin cancer, check your temperature and heart rate, and determine whether or not you are brushing your teeth effectively.

Learn more about Baracoda's daily healthtech innovations, the company's strategy, and the impact it could have on your health through better daily care—all in the privacy of your bathroom.

Thomas Serval, Co-Founder Chairman and CEO - Baracoda

Former senior executive at Microsoft and Google. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and of the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE), Thomas filed his first patent - a Bluetooth barcode scanner - in 2000, and co-founded Baracoda the following year. Thomas is a serial entrepreneur and a visionary leader. He transforms large companies, as much as the daily life of consumers, through his disruptive innovations. Thomas is a board member of Arte and Younited Credit.

Jeroen Corthout, Co-founder at Salesflare, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast. We talk about why people don't use CRMs and how to fix that. We discuss why a CRM is even more critical today with remote selling etc. We also explore the future of CRM and the impacts of data automation, sales automation, AI, and other emerging technologies.

I also learn more about the startup story behind the company. For those that don't know, Salesflare is an intelligent CRM that is attractive to startups and small businesses. It's a zero-input sales pipeline tool that thinks and works for its user, not the other way around. No more manual data entry. Salesflare fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the people you're in contact with.

Its technology takes data from social media, company databases, phone, email, calendar and hands it to you in automated customer timelines that tell you everything you need to know. You just have to write the emails, make the calls, and have the coffee. Never miss a deal again. Salesflare will tell and remind you what to do about leads so deals can't fall through the cracks anymore.

Visual pipelines and powerful insights put you in full control of your sales funnel. Intuitive and easy-to-use, Salesflare turns complexity into simplicity so you can turn leads into customers. Salesflare works wherever you work and with whatever you are working with. It can be used on desktop, mobile or just from a sidebar in your email inbox (Gmail and Outlook). Get even more out of Salesflare by integrating with 400+ other productivity tools, such as Google Apps, MailChimp, Trello and Slack.

Kognitiv Spark is a tech company and Microsoft MRPP gold partner recognized for its competency in the secure, reliable, and network agnostic applications of Mixed Reality for remote support.

Its flagship product, Remote Spark, is an industrial-grade platform that allows a remote worker to establish a low-bandwidth, secure audio-video call with a subject matter expert when they need help solving a complex problem.

The expert, who can be located anywhere in the world, can then see what the remote worker sees and use holographic assets to support the task, all the while keeping the user heads-up and hands-free. RemoteSpark can facilitate the transfer of photos, files (PDFs, Microsoft Office documents), and multi-step animated holograms.

IoT data can be tied to holographic assets and represented to remote workers for increased situational awareness. AI can be leveraged for the delivery of task-relevant assets.

Ryan Groom is Kognitiv Spark's Co-Founder and CTO. An accomplished software developer and author, Ryan achieved his first published software application in 1992. Two software books co-authored by Ryan were published in 1997 and 1998, followed by a Security Publication for Microsoft in 2004. Ryan was the Security Business Guide for ⁨About.com⁩, a New York Times web property from 2006 to 2008.

With his experience and expertise in networking, software development, and security, Ryan formed the company CyberSecure in 2002. CyberSecure became Microsoft Canada's first Gold Security Partner and won the 2004 Microsoft Canada Impact Award for Excellence in Security Solutions for the work done with the Toronto Police Department.

The company was wholly acquired on September 1st, 2004. Shortly after the acquisition of CyberSecure, Ryan joined VE Networks as Chief Engineer and later became the Chief Technology Officer, which resulted in a successful patent filing.

Ryan has consulted for some of the biggest IT companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and Bell Canada. In his spare time between holographic computing, Ryan films for his TV show Trekkit and helps out with the local Scouts Canada troop.

COVID-19 forced many industries to rethink their use of technology. This is incredibly true for construction – one of the oldest, largest, and least digitized industries in the world (only slightly ahead of Agriculture in its adoption of tech).

Construction cannot simply stop, but when the global pandemic tried to do just that, 2020 became the year that finally forced construction – an industry that remained a holdout – to officially adopt a new approach to getting work done through the use of technology.

Procore is a construction management software platform. The company is on a mission to connect everyone in construction on a global platform. It was founded in 2002, and Wyatt Jenkins joined the company earlier this year after leading product Patreon and Shutterstock.

I invited him on the podcast to discuss how 2020 became the year that the construction industry went digital and tech's role in transforming the construction industry, and what's ahead for the industry in 2021.

I learn how this transformation is creating mountains of data that can be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness within the construction industry. It is also placing a burden on construction companies to decide how to best operate with a whole new set of tools.

Mark Donnigan builds disruptive innovative startups. Mark's superpower is architecting go-to-market plans and marketing motions that drive real business outcomes for technical and product-centric founders. Mark's growth and market development experience spans 20 years as a transformative B2B marketing and business leader, driving demand, brand development, and strategy for startup and growth-stage companies.

Mark joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast to talk about what a go-to-market engineering process looks like and how to leverage category design to build your market. We explore the latest MarTech trends and why demand gen is the responsibility of the entire company, led by marketing.

Mark also shares why he feels today's CMO is a business strategist and an ecosystem/domain expert as much as a marketer. He also advises how to act as a Wartime CMO and what behavior differentiates wartime from peacetime.

Alicia Asin Perez is the CEO of Libelium, a Spanish company she founded back in 2006 to monitor and improve the efficiency of everything from agricultural crops and water quality management (for instance helping beluga wales in Alaska) to smartphone detection and smart city management using digital technology.

As an example, Libelium's technology is currently being used above the tomb of Tutankhamun to collect climatic data (relative humidity, temperature) and measure fracture aperture behavior above the tomb. The tech is even now being used to monitor water quality for the Scottish Salmon Association! Alicia is extremely focused on using digital technology for environmental and sustainability purposes, hence why her company does so much work in this area. Libelium now has around 150 employees around the world and customers in more than 120 countries.

Alicia shares her journey to becoming a tech CEO, balancing family life with two children while building and financing a global tech company with ongoing projects in every continent around the world. In 2015, Alicia became the first Spanish woman to win the National Entrepreneur Award and has gone on to collect many similar awards and speak at lots of international events.

I also learn how Libelium designs and manufactures technological solutions to make the Internet of things possible. Alica shares how Libelium's wireless sensor platform allows connecting the physical and digital worlds.