TechFirst with John Koetsier

Ad fraud costs billions each year.   Why does that matter to you … and how can we stop it?  Welcome to Tech First Draft, with John Koetsier   Ad fraud is huge ... I’ve seen estimates from $10B to even $40B a year, globally. Just today, Google kicked 600 apps with 4.5B downloads out of Google Play.   Luke Taylor, the founder and COO of TrafficGuard, is going to tell us how it works ... and … how to stop it. And yes … we’ll even talk about how ad fraud impacts you, or any average person.   The types of fraud we'll talk about include:   - App install farms   - SDK spoofing   - Misattribution (i.e. click spam, click injection; where ~80% of ad fraud occurs)   - Domain spoofing   - Cookie stuffing   - Hidden ads/ads stacking   - Bots & servers   - Malware engagement

We now have almost 8 billion people on the planet ... what kind of digital growth are we seeing from those billions on social, mobile, and the internet as a whole? Welcome to Tech First Draft, with … yours truly ...  John Koetsier Hootsuite just put together a massive series of reports -- 200+ pages -- about everything, basically, in terms of digital growth … social adoption … mobile penetration … top social networks ... emerging trends ... you name it. So we’re going to dive into all that … we’re going to chat with: Simon Kemp, who wrote the report, and Henk Campher, a VP at Hootsuite.

Fake reviews are killing our ability to google for the truth Two of the top 9 google suggestions for “fake reviews” are “fake reviews generator” and “fake reviews generator free” So we know that it’s hard to trust reviews for consumer products What about reviews for B2B software? Consumer products might cost $50 to $500 B2B software? Could be $500,000, and easily more with multi-year contracts Today, we’re chatting with TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat about a new program to kill fake reviews

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.

Let’s start with TikTok. It gained over 500 million new users just last year. Why is it growing so quickly? When you’re on TikTok -- and other, similar social platforms -- there’s an almost compulsive view and flick, view and flick as you scroll through bits of content. What’s happening in the brain while this is going on? And … what does this do to people? Does it kill their attention span? Does it ruin them for anything requiring deep focus? As a culture, we have a long history of crying wolf at the next new media platform, claiming it will ruin kids, ruin society, destroy education, kill the future workforce. Contextualize TikTok and other similar platforms for us within this history. But are digital platforms fundamentally different than previous shifts? How do you see people changing as we grow up with technology and media like this? What are the good things that come out of this?

Intro to guest Christoph Burkhardt is the CEO of OneLife They’ve developed a revolutionary new air purifier that they’re releasing at CES 2020 We’re getting a sneak peek What we talk about: What are the worst problems with indoor air? What percentage of people even know that they might have a problem? There’s a lot of existing air purifiers out there … what’s wrong with them? Replaceable air filters … one reason why people don’t buy purifiers? Talk about OneLife … what makes your solution better? PM1 … how small is that, really? And … those are the most numerous particles, right? Wireless? Battery?

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: Games Social/messaging Entertainment Food & drink Dating Shopping Music & audio Health & fitness Finance Companies and apps we talk about: WhatsApp TikTok Helo Netflix YouTube Twitch HBO Disney McDonalds Uber  Tinder Badoo Wish! AliExpress Pinduoduo Spotify  Apple YouTube ... Google Amazon Samsung  Xiaomi Sberbank

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: Many experts say that full self-driving is many years away. Some say we’ll never get there. Talk about how you think we’ll get there in 3 years. You also say we’ll need to redefine what self-driving means … maybe redo the Levels of Automation. How so? What’s unique about your technology? You have something you’ve call iDAR … what is it, and how does it work? Who are you working with right now on this? Elon Musk says we don’t need LIDAR. Agree? How important is critical mass of instrumented cars and shared data to accelerate the AI that we need for self-driving cars? Robotaxis … will we see fleets of personal cars roaming the roads as taxis? Other models? There are those who say that autonomous cars -- and their development -- is unsafe. How do you respond? Anything else?

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."