The Big Tech Show

This week, Adrian talks tech and politics with Tommy Collison, an Irish transplant to Seattle. Tommy brings us up to date on where tech and politics intersect in Silicon Valley.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With almost two weeks of rigorous testing under his belt, Adrian Weckler assesses the iPhone Xs and Xs Max . Is the screen on the Xs Max too big? Has battery life improved? Is the Xs now the best cameraphone, or is Huawei’s P20 Pro still in top spot? And can that big, big price be justified, or is it worth waiting for next month’s iPhone Xr?
Adrian also meets Jamie White, the young Dublin entrepreneur who set up Start Summit and Leading Social, a marketing agency specialising in social media strategies for big companies.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Adrian reports from Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California where he was on hand to test out the newly-launched iPhone Xs Max, Xs and Xr phones.
The big talking points are around that new 6.5-inch screen, a whopper by Apple’s standards.
But the other surprise feature came in the shape of the new Apple Watch Series 4’s ECG sensor and ‘fall detection’ feature.
Separately, Adrian talks to the futurist Lucie Greene about how the big tech companies are likely to affect our lives in coming years.
Greene is the author of 'Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future'.
Greene gives a glimpse of a dystopian near-future while avoiding much of the over-egged hysteria that sometimes compromises work in this genre.
Voting via block-chain or emergency services on demand (with 'surge pricing' models built in) may be on the way, she says, as Silicon Valley ramps up its designs on cities and towns.
Greene also takes a look at the political manoeuvres of big tech companies and their founders, from how Uber and AirBnB riles up local communities to the once-likely presidential ambitions of Mark Zuckerberg.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Adrian Weckler talks to the global IT security celebrity and virus hunter Mikko Hypponen.

Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, says that we should be taking threats from North Korea a lot more seriously than we do.

He also explains why, in the hierarchy of worst malware outbreaks in recent years, Petya was probably worse than Wannacry.

And he hears how Adrian is guilty of perpetuating one of the stupidest security practices in Ireland today.

(Hypponen is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Dublin Information Sec 2018, taking place in the RDS on October 15th.)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Adrian talks to Daniel Gross, who grew up in Israel and went to Silicon Valley as a teenager to seek fame and fortune through the famous accelerator, Y Combinator.

He set up a company called Cue and sold it to Apple for a reported $35m in 2013 before going to work for the tech giant. Last year, he left Apple to become a partner in Y Combinator and now he’s a founder of Pioneer, which says that it is looking for ‘lost Einsteins’ or talented young people who aren’t getting a chance in life.

His thesis is that there’s massive potential in young people who are missing out because they don’t come from the ‘right’ background.
Pioneer is being backed by Patrick Collison and the famous investor and former Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, who are both helping to fund it.

Adrian and Daniel talk about his life, what inspired him and why he wants to help people get ahead.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Adrian sits down for an exclusive chat with Ryan Smith, the charismatic Utah founder of the €2bn software firm Qualtrics.
As well as being one of the fastest growing tech companies in the world, Smith is on a mission to battle cancer. He started his company when he quit college to look after his father, who was diagnosed with cancer. While his dad survived, Qualtrics’ Irish boss Dermot Costello passed away earlier this year from cancer. (Costello, a huge presence in the Irish tech industry, spoke about this at length in a written interview with Adrian in January when he new he had only days to live. You can read it in full here: https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/news/tech-boss-choosing-to-define-his-life-by-optimism-not-illness-36456505.html)
Smith talks about Costello’s importance to him personally and to Qualtrics and explains why the company has named its new Dublin headquarters after Costello.
He also talks about his zeal for ‘5 For The Fight’, the $50m campaign he set up to battle cancer via research and how the Irish chapter has already raised close to €200,000 in less than a year.
Smith also talks about the “underbelly” of the tech boom, which comes as in the form of soaring rents and property prices.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Adrian and the panel discuss the thorny question of whether social media services should be allowed — or obliged — to kick people off for airing views and opinions that are considered extreme or dangerous.
It’s an issue that Twitter is currently hamfistedly trying to deal with in the case of Alex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist whose InfoWars channel has been accused of stirring up violent sentiment through its broadcasts and editorials. (Jones has argued that the September 11th terrorist attacks in the US were “an inside job” and that the Sandy Hook massacre, which killed innocent children, never happened.)
Facebook and YouTube have kicked Jones and Infowars off. Are they right?
Is this a question of freedom of speech or sensible policing by the social networks?
Joining Adrian to debate the issue are Constantin Gurdiev, a professor of finance and a former editor of Business & Finance, and Jason O’Mahony, a political pundit and regular columnist with the Times Ireland Edition and Sunday Times.
Gurdiev argues that it’s an overstep on the part of the social networks to ban voices, even ones as repugnant as Jones, as social networks are public spaces now.
O’Mahony says that it’s proportionate to ban characters like Jones.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

They came to Dublin to seek success and fortune.
This week, Adrian Weckler sits down with two ambitious, successful young entrepreneurs who have one thing in common: they came to Dublin for the promise of its tech industry.
What did they find? Is Dublin the real tech capital they had heard about? Can you make it big here? What about those who say that Dublin is just a glorified big outsourcing centre for multinationals?
American Austin Spivey (head of operations for Wia Technologies) and Sergei Lyubka (co-founder and CTO Of Cesanta) give a frank assessment of what’s good and bad about Dublin.
Unsurprisingly, accommodation comes across as a nightmare.
“I’ve found it harder to get an apartment here than in San Francisco,” says Spivey. “I would say that it’s really tough.”
On the other hand, the quality of the people in Dublin and the number of other companies performing at a high level is a big draw, say Spivey and Lyubka.
“Dublin is a proper tech capital,” says Lyubka. “Most of our market is the US so we could locate anywhere but Dublin is where we want to be.”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week Adrian Weckler looks at the list of sins Facebook is again having to answer for. Joined by political correspondent Laura Larkin and business editor Donal O’Donovan, the panel assesses Facebook’s excuses to an Irish government committee and looks at what might happen in the short term. Will there be a Digital Safety Commissioner? Will any political regulation actually materialise? And do people really care about all the hoopla around Facebook in the first place?

The matter of a fresh tech bubble is also explored, partially triggered by Facebook’s huge fall in valuation after its earnings report last week. But are today’s tech companies really overvalued or is this just more doom-mongering by commentators hoping to be correct at some point? The panel looks at the companies involved and the basic factors that could prove or disprove the existence of bloated valuations.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is a downside to tech cities. On the US west coast, where the biggest tech companies have their headquarters, there is also terrible homelessness.

In this podcast episode, Adrian goes to Seattle, arguably America’s fastest-growing tech metropolis.

He poses the question; why is homelessness is so bad in a city that’s booming so much?

While Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing and other huge firms soar, so does the number of people in tent cities alongside roads in the city.

It’s a dystopian scenario. Adrian asks the leaders of local homelessness organisations why it’s happening and talks to one local politician about the connections between big tech companies and the poverty problem.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.