Can the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool clean your air from smoke and soot? 

That’s what I have been testing for parts of the past few months during the western fires that hit California, Oregon, and Washington State. They’ve been banished from the news cycle thanks to the impending election, but the fires this summer were devastating, horrific, and massive. 

When you can’t breathe safely, few other things in life matter.

The Forbes story for this podcast episode is here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/18/dyson-hotcool-cleaned-70-of-smoke-particles-from-my-air-during-the-fires-in-california-oregon-washington/

Should social media censor free speech?

Something fairly unprecedented happened this past week: Facebook and Twitter both blocked a NY Post story.

Now … whatever you think about that story (and I think it’s pretty flimsy) blocking it almost immediately is pretty shocking. How should social media deal with controversial subjects … or false information?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of the open source social network Minds.com, about what big tech and big social should do, about algorithms, shadow banning, free speech, virality, and what Ottman is doing with Minds.com to fix it.

Do we now have near real-time gene sequencing? And if so … what does that unlock?

In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Dr Roel Wuyts, principal scientist at IMEC and a professor at KU Leuven about gene sequencing, which used to take a lot of time.

Remember the Human Genome project? It started October 1, 1990 and completed in April 2003.

Now there’s a way of sequencing a whole genome in just 10 minutes for some sequences and a few hours for a whole human genome, which should unlock major new capabilities like personalized medicine and smarter treatment of currently deadly diseases.

Full transcript will go here:

Forbes story will go here:

You might think the iPhone 12 starts at one dollar under $800. You might even have a distinct memory of seeing a price that looked suspiciously like $799 during the Apple special event yesterday.

And you’d be right on one of those two beliefs. (The latter.)

This story is live on Forbes:

We watched almost 7.5 billion hours of live streaming content in the last three months, up 92% from last year. Amazingly, just one company owns a massive 91.1% share of all the hours streamed: the Amazon-owned Twitch.

So Twitch is definitely the 900-pound gorilla of the live-streaming category.

Or it is it?

This story is published on Forbes here:

Could Apple and Google soon be two of the most important companies in health? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with former Apple CEO John Sculley, who has invested in multiple health tech companies.

Apple owns the most popular healthtech wearable on the planet, and Google bought Fitbit to compete. Both are investing in health, fitness, and wellness technology. Current Apple CEO Tim Cook has even said that Apple’s greatest contribution to history will be in the field of health. Amazon's jumping into health too, with Amazon Halo.

We talk about who will win, who are the other players, and what Sculley sees as the future of health care in the U.S. and globally.

In the stone ages of mobile a couple of years ago, you actually had to tap on an app icon and open an app in order to access its functionality. While backwards, onerous, and tedious, this ensured that if I was ordering Air Jordans from Shoe Giant #1 or a Big Mac from Ronald McDonald, I would have at least a couple of interactions with the Nike brand or McDonalds.

Now, now so much.

This story is live at Forbes here:

Drone deliveries won’t be common until we figure out distributed charging. But maybe … we already have ...

In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Leonid Plekhanov from Global Energy Transmission (GET). GET has a last-mile in-air fast charging solution for drones (and another for undersea drones).

Amazon’s been touting drone delivery for years. And this summer, Domino’s delivered a pizza to a customer on the beach via drone. But really, no-one's doing this at scale. With the ability to charge your drones wherever they go, the much-needed last-mile solution might now be here.

Full transcript will be here:

Forbes story will be here:

Is the future of robotics in the cloud? In this episode of TechFirst we're chatting with and Amazon exec, AWS Robotics general manager Roger Barga, about how Amazon’s “fake” robots are making real robots smarter, faster.

We’re seeing more and more robots in manufacturing, services, hospitality, and almost every other industry ... but there are still huge gaps in software to run and manage and coordinate all our robots and drones. Amazon's reducing the cost to train, test and deploy robots by a factor of perhaps 1,000 thanks to AWS RoboMaker and WorldForge.

We chat about companies like iRobot that are vastly improving their robots, the future of robotics in both the near and far term, and how Amazon 'eats its own dog food' by using AWS RoboMaker to train and deploy robots in its own warehouses.

Health and fitness apps are winning the Covid-19 era, thanks to closed gyms. But a certain kind of health and fitness app is winning mobile, according to a new report from Apptopia.

“Six out of ten of the top Health & Fitness apps are apps that offer video workouts or video-guided exercises,” Apptopia says. “If non-workout apps like Calm, Headspace, and Flo were not included here, the ratio of video to non-video fitness apps would be even greater.”

This story is currently live at Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/05/the-top-10-health--fitness-apps-of-2020-have-one-thing-in-common-mostly/