Are your headphones not providing the quality sound that they might actually be capable of? Can you get audiophile quality sound with hardware that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars?   

This company says it can make your headphones better … with software.  

Welcome to Tech First Draft.   

See all TFDs here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first-draft/ 

My guest, Matthias, is from Dirac: https://www.dirac.com  

My name is John Koetsier, and today we’re speaking with Mathias Johansson, the CEO of Dirac.  

He’s fixing crappy audio with software, and we’re going to find out how ...  

What we talk about:  

- You’re on a quest to fix bad audio. Why?  

- What is the problem with most headphones/earbuds sold today?  

- You are trying to fix it in software … via an app. How? 

- What headphones or earbuds do you support right now? Will you eventually support all brands?  

- Your software learns or adjust to different hardware … how? Do you test all different types of hardware in the studio?  

- How close are you right now … you’re in beta still, right?  

- When I tested, it sounded great. But podcasts had some echo … perhaps because of lower-quality recordings?

Why is technology so important for the next decade of business?

Why is every company a tech company?

And how are expectations changing over the next decade?

I talk about State Farm, NASCAR, Allbirds, and TikTok in an interview with Sean Moffit of FutureproofingNext.

Intro to guest

What we talk about:

We’re chatting with Apptopia’s VP of Insights Adam Blacker about the top 100 apps of 2019. Which made the cut … what surprised us … what this means for tech giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all the others in 2020 ...

Mobile app categories we hit:

Companies and apps we talk about:

We’re talking about autonomous driving ... specifically … how soon we can expect self-driving cars? And what changes will they bring in our economy and our society?

My guest is Blair Lacorte, the president of AEye, a Silicon Valley company that “develops advanced vision hardware, software and algorithms that act as the eyes and visual cortex of autonomous vehicles.”

He says: we’ll have self-driving cars within 3 years.

What we cover:

We talk to Robert Scoble about iOS spellcheck: is it really that bad (yes), why it's that bad (privacy?), and how this will impact Apple's competitiveness against Google and Android.

"80% said it got at least a little worse than before than two years ago"

"Swipe is a good new feature that comes with this system, but it's an immature system. It hasn't been trained very well."

"I had dinner with the guy who runs Siri at Apple. He said ... Google is beating us ... we see Google's learning at a faster rate."

You either love Cybertruck or you hate it. Designer Fede Ponce has worked for Nissan and BMW. He's currently consulting with Mercedes, and won awards for his work on the Iron Man and Thor movies. He's worked on autonomous vehicles and heads-up displays. Hear why he's ordered a Tesla Cybertruck.

chat with Amazon VP of smart home Daniel Rausch about:

Are we wasting billion on smart home technology? 70% of smart home tech that gets returned ... has nothing wrong with it. TechSee CEO Eiten Cohen surveyed smart home owners to find out what the biggest problems are ... and gives us the goods.