Tech Up Podcast

Big tech firms are investing in data centers as they compete for the $214 billion cloud computing market. Explaining what cloud computing is, why big tech is betting big on future contracts.

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cloud computing

Amazon creates hundreds of products a year. With many of them, they follow a specific playbook that allows them to crush their competitors incredibly effectively.

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amazon

For 14 years, Nokia was the king of telecom. That may be a surprise to you, considering their market share is now a mere fraction of what it used to be (down to less than 5% from their peak of 50% in 2007).  We'll explore how the Finnish tech giant grew from a conglomerate that once made paper and rubber products to inventing disruptive tech like the 1G/2G cellular network (which made SMS text messaging possible!).

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nokia

Last year, 50% of online transactions were made through Stripe. In fact, you probably make payments on Stripe all the time and aren't even aware of it.  Order a Lyft? Stripe. Buy something on Amazon? Stripe again. Book a room on Expedia? You guessed it … Stripe! The list continues.

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stripe

Mind-boggling fun fact: Last year, 50% of online transactions were made through Stripe. In fact, you probably make payments on Stripe all the time and aren't even aware of it.  Order a Lyft? Stripe. Buy something on Amazon? Stripe again. Book a room on Expedia? You guessed it … Stripe! The list continues. Basically, if you pull out your wallet to buy anything online, you can bet two Irish boys are smiling somewhere.  While other kids in school were playing video games, Stripe’s founders John Collison and Patrick Collison were busy selling their first company for $5 million. That’s before graduating high school, by the way.  “Wait, what do you mean there’s no school valet for Lambos?”  As time went on, the brothers continued to build online businesses and found themselves increasingly frustrated with the absence of a decent payment processing platform. So, they did what all great entrepreneurs do: They turned their frustration into inspiration.  The Collison brothers would proceed to lay the foundation for what would become the internet's standard payment system. The rest is history.  Perhaps Stripe has the best business model of any company: Take a fee on everyone else's debit/credit card transactions (2.9% plus $0.30, for each successful transaction.  That may seem like a small amount of money, but after processing a trillion here and a trillion there, soon enough you're talking about "real money".  VCs love Stripe (to the tune of a $35 billion-dollar valuation, based on the startup's most recent funding) so much so, that its founders now share the title of the youngest "billionaire bros” on earth.

In a span of 11 years, Airbnb went from being a company that rents 3 mattresses to a company that counts 150 million users, arranges 2 million bookings per day, and whose value is estimated at $38 billion. To help you understand how Airbnb achieved such a huge success, we’re taking you back to 2008, when Airbnb provided the people with a clever way of earning extra money off of their homes as the housing market was crashing.

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airbnb

The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them.

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revolution of internet

A growing number of classrooms in China are equipped with artificial-intelligence cameras and brain-wave trackers. While many parents and teachers see them as tools to improve grades, they’ve become some children’s worst nightmare.

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ai in classrooms

Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and other traditional food companies are all betting the rise of meatless alternatives could permanently change the way people look at meat. But are they right?

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future of meat

Antitrust, billion dollar fines, privacy violations and numerous federal investigations. Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are feeling the pressure from a wave of government inquiries. Will they be broken up? Or will they survive?

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