50% of the food produced globally is wasted. At the same time, a child dies from hunger every 10 seconds, and 25,000 people starve to death every single day. Another billion, almost, are malnourished and don't have enough food.

Can AI fix this?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with SPRK.Global CEO Alexander Piutti, who is a finalist in Samsung's Extreme Tech Challenge startup competition.

Are subscriptions the new retail? We know digital retail is way up, thanks to COVID. But … surprisingly ... subscription purchases are way up too. 

Streaming: jumped up to 89.8%

Consumer goods: growth of 105%-145%

Education: growth as high as 60%

SaaS/Cloud: subscriber growth peaked at 51%

That's interesting because we tend not to want long-term commitments especially during a downturn. We chat about all the details with Dan Burkhart, CEO of Recurly.

Can we design AI that will teach itself how to drive a car? 

Self-driving cars will unlock trillions in market value and probably change our lives with fractional car ownership, better ride-sharing ... maybe even cars that pay for themselves. Also … they'll give us back months if not years of our time that we currently spend driving.

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski.

Helm.ai has developed a new AI technology it calls "Deep Teaching" which it says will make it 100,000 times cheaper to train self-driving car AIs.

What can we learn from the queen of LinkedIn about telling stories for warm robots? 

If you’ve been around LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed Goldie Chan. The green hair makes her stand out … but her consistent calm, positive, and supportive content help you center and ground and ... sure, even feel good about yourself.

Goldie started doing video on LinkedIn, and never really stopped. She has the longest daily video streak on LinkedIn, and got shoutouts from top execs there as well as elsewhere, which has turned into an amazing career in speaking, consulting, writing for Forbes and ... telling stories.

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time with Goldie on her show. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, Goldie's coming on TechFirst to share what she does best.

At WWDC this year Apple essentially killed the IDFA, the identifier for advertisers. It’s not completely gone … but it’s now opt-in with a big scary warning.

Now we’re wondering … will this kill modern mobile marketing as we know it?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Eric Seufert former VP of User Acquisition for Rovio. He runs Mobile Dev Memo, QuantMar.com, and is a consultant.

What we chat about:

Is this a mobile marketing apocalypse?

Attribution

Look-alike audiences

AEO and VO: Facebook

tROAS: Google

Retargeting

Ad-based monetization

Segmentation & cohorts

LTV modeling

Fingerprinting

Facebook & Google

Ad networks

SSPs

DSPs

Need offbeat growth tactics for uncertain times?

These are definitely uncertain times. COVID would have been enough, with its massive health and economic consequences. Add George Floyd’s murder as a flashpoint to decades of simmering racial inequities, and we’ve got a perfect storm. In the middle of all this, we’ve got people trying to do their startups afloat in one of most challenging times ever.

In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Michele Romanow, who co-founded Clearbanc, helped raised over $300 million, serves as its President, and is a star on Canada's Shark Tank: Dragon's Den.

We chat about:

Customer acquisition tactics

Keeping your customers happy

Business models

Raising money while preserving your equity

Hiring and team building

Product development

Growth (yes, even now)

And much more …

Can virtual reality make your home gym less boring ... and maybe improve your workouts?

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Eric Malafeew, former chief architect of Guitar Hero. He's worked on Mars landers and the Xbox Kinect, among other things, and now has VZfit, a VR app that makes workouts feel like a game

I’ve been using Beat Saber to get a bit of a workout at home in VR. But according to Malafeew, VZfit can make your workouts better … longer … more frequent ... and more intense without you even really feeling like you're working out.

The idea is that you bike on your stationary bike and, thanks to VR, go anywhere in the world … fight tanks … drive Formula 1 ... face off at the OK Corral ... and much more.

Can we really decentralize the internet with blockchain? The internet was originally designed to be decentralized ... and that’s how it was supposed to work for emergencies and disasters. Lately, it's been getting more and more centralized controlled by major corporations, as well as countries like Russia and China.

One company thinks it has a solution.  In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with the cofounder and CEO of ThreeFold, Kristof de Spiegeleer, who thinks the internet should be like electricity: available and almost-free everywhere. But with a key difference: enabled by all, in a sort of mesh networking scenario.

His not-so-secret weapon?

"Technically we have 18,000 CPU cores and 90 million gigabytes, which is a lot of capacity. It's probably between five and ten times more than all of the capacity of all the blockchain projects together."

What are the top reasons you want to keep working from home after Coronavirus? Here's what about 150,000 people said in a survey.

Listen to the show for the full story, or check it out in my Forbes column.

Why games are making record revenues in a recession, with Unity VP Julie Shumaker. In a recession revenues generally go down. That’s not been the case in 2020, at least for games. Games have been seeing record-high revenues over the past few months ... we'll chat about what's hot and why ...

What we talk about:

 - First off, what happened with games over the past 3-5 months?

 - What kind of games grew the most?

 - Weekends and weekdays kinda flipped. Why?

 - Revenue was up … how?

 - What’s different about “pandemic gamers?”

 - Could you basically track COVID-19 across the world in game downloads and sessions?

 - Are games recession-proof?

And … the world-famous TechFirst 10 in 5 … 10 questions, 5 minutes

 - Favorite piece of tech gear in your house

 - Can’t-do-without-it tech that you wear

 - Android or iOS?

 - EV or gas?

 - Mac or Windows?

 - GIF or JIF?

 - Favorite tech news source?

 - Do you want a self-driving car or do you want to drive yourself, forever?

 - Elon Musk offers you a trip to Mars. In or out?

 - Alexa or Hey Google or Hey Siri?