This week the hosts welcome Ashley Crowder, CEO of Vntana, which manages CAD drawings and other 3D assets for companies in industries as diverse as fashion and concrete. The news segment was focused on the imminent shut down of TikTok, and rumors Elon will announce a deal to buy the platform before the deadline Sunday night. Biden mentioned tech oligarchs in his farewell address to the nation, and we talk about them, too. Ashley's company has been around twelve years, first focused on consumer marketing and live events before pivoting to solving companies' problems managing and distributing their 3D content. Ashely is also a pioneering female founder, of which there are still precious few today. 

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This week our guest is esteemed journalist Dean Takahasi, dean of tech writers, who helps us analyze this year's CES. News topics on our minds were the LA fires, which have personally affected Charlie and Ted, Meta's big announcement on content moderation, free speech, and Jensen Huang's Nvidia keynote, which promised a new AI-capable personal computer on the edge, and their plans to power a robotics revolution worth trillions. Charlie and Ted found CES a bit disappointing, especially the XR area, which was dominated by Xreal. Meta was also there for the first time, promoting Ray Bans and their MR Quest 3 headset. 

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Charlie, Ted, and Rony have a wide-ranging preview of CES 2025 and what to expect from the coming year from Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association which owns CES. To be sure, we'll be seeing a lot more AI in everything. Mobility, robotics, drones, wearables and healthtech are going to have a strong presence this year as well. Gary has a new book, Pivot or Die, which takes a look at the boom in productivity that companies are going to experience with AI. He is optimistic about the potential for the new administration to create a business environment with reduced regulation and greater freedom to pursue M&A, which will stimulate venture investments in new technologies. This, Gary says, does not mean no regulation, it means the right kind of regulation.

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Charlie, Rony, and Ted are out in full force to greet the world's foremost tech consultant and professor Shelly Palmer, CEO of the Palmer Group. We hit the news quickly, Perplexity raises $500M at a $9B valuation, ChatGPT under assault, AI's coming "clean." Our wide ranging conversation with Shelley was focused on some important trends in AI and XR, and especially the long process of integrating AI into company workflow. It's going to take time and training, perhaps more than five years for that to be happy, Shelly said. Other 2024 events we looked back on: the ongoing AI revolution, the crypto run up, agentic AI, the possible TikTok ban, AI & XR, and the end of the media business as we know it. Audiences are on different screens doing different things. The implications are staggering. It decided the election.  

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This week Charlie and Rony welcome Russell Patton, Product Manager for the Snap Spectacles AR headset. It's a news week rich with AI news from OpenAI, Google, and others. OpenAI suffered a major outage on Wednesday, which may be related, according to Rony, to the theft of weighted models from its database. We thought it was related to stress on the system from the introduction of video generator Sora. Samsung gave the press a look at their upcoming Project Moohan on which they collaborated with Google on an AR OS for Android, and Qualcomm for its new microprocessor. Rony is in his element as discuss the new Spectacles, and Snap's strategy, with Patton. 

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This week Charlie and Ted are joined by Michael Murray, CEO of Kopin (NASDQ: KOPN), a leading developer of microdisplay and optical technologies for military and enterprise applications. Meta needs a hit entertainment franchise for its platforms, so they've made a deal with filmmaker James Cameron, to make one for them. With Elon Musk at the elbow of the President, does his competitor, OpenAI, who Musk is suing, have anything to worry about? Xreal released their new Xreal One Series of assisted reality smart glasses, or screen extenders, which now feature one touch screen anchoring. 

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In this week's pod the hosts discussed big tech's investment in Trump, Australia's move to regulate social media, and Google's accidental preview of Jarvis, which will be the Android answer to AI Siri, and may even launch sooner. They also highlighted a company called Mawari, which is working on tokenizing streaming XR content, aiming to simplify the distribution of spatial content without the need for apps. Our guest is Alex Masharov, founder of Higgsfield, who shared his journey from Russia to Silicon Valley. He discussed his previous success with an AI company sold to Snap, which developed real-time face filters that went viral. Now, with Higgsfield, Alex aims to revolutionize video content creation by focusing on personalized, AI-generated dramas. 

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This week the hosts are in full force. Rony talks about his AI startup, Synthbee. It's earnings week, so we got a look at just how much money tech companies are making and their projected investments in AI. OpenAI's ChatGPT search is coming for Google. Inbrain Neuroelectronics raised $50M, and Spot AI raised $31M to turn those janky security cameras into AI-driven video assistants. Our guest is Shara Senderoff, Co-Founder of Futureverse.

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This week our guest is Deniz Özgür, co-founder, co-CEO, Spacerunners. Space Runners is a fashion-tech platform that operates at the intersection of digital fashion, blockchain technology, and the metaverse. Deniz was named a Forbes 30 under 30 CEO last year. Spacerunners uses AI to help brands bring their products to new markets, like the Metaverse. Rony is off for the Jewish holiday Sukkot. Slow news week, unless you're Perplexity AI search, doubling your valuation with another $500 M raise. Microsoft's Army HoloLens, or IVAS, continues its slow death. In another defense story that should surprise no one, the USAF is recruiting from the Drone Racing League, an acknowledgment that the Top Gun of the future may not be piloting a plane.

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This week our guest is Joaquin Cuenca Abela, co-founder and CEO of Freepik. Rony is off for the Jewish holiday, Sukkot. Earlier in the week, he launched his new company SynthBee with $20 million dollars of VC money. Also in the news, Nvidia enters software with a high-performing open source AI model, competing with its biggest customers. Our sponsor Zappar now has got a deep-pocketed backer with an exit strategy, Infinite Reality. Freepik CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abela joins us to share the story of his company, Freepik, which started out as an ad-supported search site for free pictures. Today Freepik makes around $100M a year in subscription revenues from their seven hundred and fifty million month unique visitors. For the past two years, Freepik has been leaning heavily into generative AI, and is adding new features, like text-to-video, which he hinted may be coming soon. Freepik hit our radar last year when it acquired the AI upscaling tool Magnific. 

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