The Big Tech Show

Having tested dozens of handsets this year, Adrian Weckler gives his verdict on what the best cameraphone on the market is at present.
It comes down to a battle between three models: Huawei’s P20 Pro, Apple’s iPhone X and Samsung’s Galaxy S9 Plus. Adrian picks the winner, the runner up and the also-ran, as well as a budget alternative.
Adrian also looks at some of the best summer technology gadgets on the market right now, including the best new drone, portable power bank and travel camera.

Adrian also asks an awkward question: should the biggest tech companies be doing more to get involved with local communities in Ireland?

He looks at the cases of Google, Facebook and Apple and compares them to a time 100 years ago when giant companies like Guinness felt a deeper responsibility to helping out in the communities they operated in.

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This week, Adrian gets a behind-the-scenes tour of Microsoft’s campus headquarters in Redmond, Seattle.

This includes a preview of the latest in
he company’s ‘mixed reality’ headset, Hololens. It also includes a discussion on the ethics and future of artificial intelligence, which Microsoft is laying great emphasis on.

The company also lays out some futuristic plans, including a data centre under the sea.

And it gives a complete rundown of what the office of the future might look like, including giant collaborative touchscreens and meetings controlled by voice assistants.

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This week, Adrian Weckler talks to two women directing crucial operations in two of the world’s biggest tech companies.

The Big Tech Show travelled to Seattle to meet Emma Williams, the Dubliner who’s now Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Office Products Group.

As she tells Adrian, it was originally the study of Old Norse and Anglo Saxon English in Trinity College that gave Williams a propensity to learn open source code.

20 years on, Williams is directing some of Microsoft’s most important products, having left her mark on Bing, artificial intelligence and one of its newest initiatives, Microsoft Teams.

Adrian then met Emily Vacher, Facebook’s director of trust and safety.
A former FBI agent, Emily recounts why she joined America’s famed law enforcement agency and how that led to a career in Facebook. She also talks about the tech giant’s latest initiative in Ireland, where Facebook has teamed up with An Garda Siochana to distribute alerts whenever there is a credible threat of a child being abducted.

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How has it come to a situation where a big tech company announcing 1,000 new jobs is freaking people out?
This week’s Amazon jobs announcement has led to a backlash from people who feel it will put extra pressure on rents and infrastructure in the capital.
“Where will they live?”
“Oh great, even higher rents...”
“Why are these jobs all in Dublin?”
“How many will come from abroad?”
20, 10 or even five years ago, big job announcements were seen as a huge boost to the country.
Today, they’re seen as a threat.
Adrian Weckler and Irish Independent environment editor Paul Melia discuss the origins of the problem and potential solutions.
The resentment appears to come from those trying to buy a home or rent an apartment. The already sparse stock of available accommodation gets thinner and thinner. A two-bedroom terraced ex-council home that sold for €280,000 three years ago now costs €400,000. A 450 square foot one-bed apartment that cost €900 now costs €1,200.
Engineers can afford to pay this. Retail or service industry workers can’t.
At the heart of the problem is the feeling that we haven’t gotten our act together on housing and infrastructure.
So more and more of us are being squeezed out of parts of the city where rents and house prices are rocketing.
But instead of blaming ourselves (planners, politicians, councillors, lawyers and countless Nimby-addled community associations) for the Wild West property market, we’re turning on companies offering new jobs.
If only multinational firms would stop coming in with these jobs, things might be easier for ‘ordinary people’.
Get lost, Google. Feck off, Facebook. Adios, Amazon.
But are we that bad at steering our own country?

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This week, Adrian Weckler sits down with Stripe’s all-action chief operating officer, Claire Hughes-Johnson, one of the star speakers at this year’s Moneyconf conference.

They talk about solving problems, problems with homelessness in big tech cities like San Francisco and why there’s still a long way to go for online payments to fulfil its potential.

Stripe, the online payments firm set up by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, is now one of Silicon Valley’s most important tech firms. It was valued at over $9bn a year ago but is almost certainly worth more now.

“Are robots actually becoming intelligent?”

“Is my job under threat from intelligent machines?”

“How close are Google, Amazon and Apple to giving me a real assistant?”

“Is Elon Musk right that machines are going to wake up and start killing us?”

These are the practical questions that dominate today’s discussions around artificial intelligence.

Adrian Weckler sits down with AI expert and founder of SoapBox Labs, Patricia Scanlon, to go through dozens of ordinary questions about what will now happen in normal life with AI on the rise.

The two also discuss the latest developments in voice recognition technology, including the question over whether we should have a right to know when we’re talking to a chatbot.

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This week, Adrian Weckler and Dr Mick O’Kerrigan from RecommenderX discuss 20 of the dumbest, faddiest tech ideas in recent years.

From connected forks and ‘smart umbrellas’ to 3D televisions and digital photo frames, the two mercilessly condemn the worst of our tech gadgets to their hall of shame.

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“I run a sports club – does this mean I have to ask them for permission to email now?”

“Is it the end of cold-calling?”

“What about if I want to email everyone about a charity I’m supporting?”

These are the practical questions that many are asking as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force.

Adrian Weckler sits down with Daragh O’Brien (founder of data privacy expert firm Castlebridge) to go through dozens of layman questions about what will now happen in everyday business – and normal life – under the new law.

Adrian also drops in on Pointy, the Dublin startup that has seen its product-discovery technology adopted by one in seven Dublin retail outlets. He talks with company founders Mark Cummins and Charles Bibby about their story and what the future has in store.

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Adrian is joined by culture journalist Roisin Kiberd and INM’s head of product (and Sunday Independent columnist) Steve Dempsey to pore through some of the biggest tech tissues of the week.

- Do people have a right to know that they’re talking to a robot (such as Google’s Duplex)? Is it amazing or creepy?

- Has Ireland made a mistake in choosing 16 as the digital age of consent rather than 13, like the UK? While there are pros and cons to the higher age, there’s a nagging feeling that it may be unenforceable and, ironically, let tech companies off the hook for properly catering to young teenagers (as it can now assume they’re all 16).

- Twitter starts hiding replies from those it deems to be ‘trolls’;

- Facebook’s removal of fake accounts and millions of pieces of content involving extreme violence or pornography;

- Airbnb to be banned from parts of Amsterdam – will more and more cities follow?

- Banks trawling through your social media – honesty or a step too far?

- How Elon Musk and Grimes got together over a nerdy science fiction joke about artificial intelligence.

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What sort of power do ‘influencers’ really yield?
Adrian sits down with one of the most powerful social media figures in Ireland, who is a wanted man by commercial brands.
James Kavanagh explains what he does, why it works and how he is now earning a multiple of what he did in previous jobs.
Honesty and originality, he says, are key attributes, as well a particularly strong work ethic. He discusses how coming from a family of strongly motivated individuals, including his famous brother (Conor McGregor’s trainer), has influenced his aptitude to graft.
James also talks about why Snapchat — the platform that originally gave him his biggest boost — now appears to be “stagnating” compared to Instagram.

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