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 ...

President Trump wants to ban TikTok in the U.S., but he’ll consider allowing a U.S. company to purchase it. As long as, in a novel twist, the U.S. government gets a cut. Meanwhile, U.S.-owned Triller is positioning itself as the biggest beneficiary to India’s TikTok ban, with 40 million new installs, and by extension, the likely winner of an American ban.

But in this latest episode of Meet the Kardashians, White House edition, they’re all potentially being played.

Because the fastest-growing non-TikTok short-form video entertainment app is also Chinese-owned. Economic and trade policy, meet Whack-A-Mole.

Two things have grown like crazy in 2020: Coronavirus, and the global app economy. 2020 has been crazy, but there’s been massive growth in some sectors, and mobile is one of them

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Lexi Sydow, a senior market insights manager at App Annie, about the state of the global app economy.

The good news: some newbies are winning and it’s not all the rich becoming richer. And, mobile isn’t just about what happens on your phone anymore.

We talk about:

 - downloads and growth

 - countries that are growing in time in apps and on devices

 - surprises in the data

 - time for new apps to get on to top downloads and top grossing lists

 - why new apps are getting so big so quick

 - new features apps are adding

 - the overall economic impact of apps

A high school student at Jericho High School in New York has built an AI framework that can predict air pollution levels with 92% accuracy using neural networks, random forest, and other techniques.

That ... could be better accuracy than most weather forecasters.

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Richard Ren about his framework, including how he learned to code, why he got into AI and machine learning, what data he's using, what technologies he's implementing, and what data is most predictive of high pollution levels.

Wind power has been around for a long time. For commercial applications, there are massive turbines with wings the size of 747s. 

For home, there have been a number of options, but durability has been a concern, as well as bird safety. Solar has seen much wider adoption, but it doesn’t work everywhere ...

Now there’s a solution from an Icelandic company that looks safe and affordable. To learn more, we chat with Sam Gerbus from IceWind “extreme energy solutions."

Alexa, Siri, Google: which is the smartest? Dumbest? Most useful? Growing the fastest? 

And ... what capabilities will AI assistants have in the future? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Brian Jackson from Info-Tech Research Group.

On the one hand … Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are amazing technology ... on the other, they face-palm on some ridiculously simple tasks. We chat about:

- which are leading (and getting smarter faster)

- Google Duplex

- Alexa and smart home

- Privacy

- Why Apple's challenged to make Siri truly smart

- Smartglasses ... how they'll work with AI assistants

If you’ve been around marketing, you'll have heard the phrase "customer journey." It's what people do when they buy ... or don't buy.

Naturally, marketers want to optimize that trip, and Adobe has developed an AI system that finds out where those journeys break. Theoretically, that will help brands sell more.

Our guest this episode: Steve Hammond, a director at Adobe Experience Cloud.