Tech Talks Daily

I recently discovered a Belgian company called Soda who focuses on data quality monitoring and testing. Think of it a bit like application or software monitoring which is now ubiquitous. Soda scans for issues caused by human error, firmware upgrades, schema changes, cross-platform integration snafus, bought data, or transformation bugs. The aim is to automate, verify, and validate the flow of data from various sources and encourage collaboration between software/data engineers and downstream business decision-makers. The big idea here is to eliminate so-called 'silent data issues.' These are the issues that bubble up (hence the name Soda!) further downstream having gone undetected in datasets. In an era when most companies are moving towards being entirely data-driven, ensuring data is of the optimum quality is critical. I invited Soda CEO and founder Maarten Masschelein on the Tech Talks Daily to learn more. Maarten discusses why data quality monitoring is becoming a hot topic and provides examples of where bad data has caused serious problems. I also learn how Soda was listed as a data management Cool Vendor by Gartner.

It has been remarkable to witness the enterprise transition to the cloud in just a few short years -- but what is next? Multi-cloud networking is the new way for enterprises to manage applications worldwide for dispersed and remote users. Managing applications in the cloud - and through multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) -- can mean a host of benefits, including reduced latency, more affordable transit costs, and heightened security. However, we are not there yet. Most organizations are still struggling with the complex networking infrastructures needed to achieve "a multi-cloud networking Nirvana." Ramesh Prabagaran, co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, recognized the opportunity for a newer type of infrastructure -- one that would provide enterprises a better way to network to multiple CSPs - a safer, less complex, and more affordable way. As the former co-founder of Viptela, acquired by Cisco for $610 million in 2017, Ramesh is one of the pioneers in the SD Wan field - and is no stranger to overcoming serious networking challenges. Ramesh and his team at Prosimo have developed a single, vertically integrated infrastructure stack to deliver an application experience that balances performance, security, and costs across multi-cloud environments. Just months out of stealth, the team has had early success with several enterprise customers, including Flexport, announced partnerships with Google Cloud, AWS, and Verizon, and was recently included in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Networking Software. Multi-cloud networking is complex and not easy to do or even understand. Still, in today's episode, Ramesh breaks it down and explains it all in a language everyone can understand. He also shares his own story, which involves a series of successes and innovations.

The way we authenticate online is fundamentally broken. Technology has evolved significantly since the advent of the internet, yet we still rely primarily on passwords for authentication. Passwords pose significant security and user experience issues, negatively impacting both consumers and businesses. In addition, passwords are also responsible for the vast majority of data breaches each year. According to Verizon's 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, 81% of all breaches involve weak or stolen passwords. In addition to being insecure, passwords also introduce significant consumer frustration. According to a recent Google study, ~75% of users report feeling overwhelmed trying to keep track of their passwords. So it's no surprise that users often re-use the same password across sites to make this process easier, but it introduces its own risks. Julianna Lamb, co-founder, and CTO of Stytch, joins me on Tech Talks Daily to explore this topic in more detail. Stytch is the first company that's built a platform for passwordless authentication so that any application or website can embed passwordless sign-up and login flows. I learn more about the story behind Stytch. We also discuss how thousands of companies have used Stytch's software to eliminate password-based authentication's security and user experience shortcomings.

Consumers seem to begin their holiday shopping earlier each year. This year, it's likely that shoppers will start buying even earlier as supply chain shortages impact everything from popular toys to footwear and even coffee. So, how should retailers prepare for this shopping season? For e-commerce retailers, website crashes or slow sites are all too common during holiday shopping, leading to frustrations for customers and potentially costing companies millions during downtimes on top of ongoing shortages. As a result, IT teams can become overwhelmed trying to ensure there are no disruptions for shoppers, but there is only so much they can do. However, automating certain processes throughout the e-commerce workflow can help mitigate these issues and ensure customers don't feel any impact. And while automation is effective, many teams don't know what to automate to be most successful. Ritu Dubey from Digitate discusses how retailers should automate workflows to relieve IT teams so that they can rest easy this holiday season, knowing that their customers are having a good experience.

Fernando Lucini, Global Data Science & Machine Learning Engineering Lead at Accenture, joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss synthetic data. We explore how privacy concerns and process issues are still holding businesses back from developing advanced analytics initiatives – and how synthetic data (artificially generated by an AI algorithm) might be able to help. We discuss how the technology has potential across a range of industries. Synthetic data's most obvious benefit is that it eliminates the risk of exposing critical data and compromising the privacy and security of companies and customers. With synthetic data, a company can quickly train machine learning models on large data sets, accelerating the processes of training, testing, and deploying an AI solution. While the benefits of synthetic data are compelling, realizing them can be difficult. Generating synthetic data is a highly complex process, and to do it right, an organization needs to do more than plug in an AI tool to analyze its data sets. We discuss how the task requires people with specialized skills and truly advanced knowledge of AI.

Dan Greenberg, president of Sharethrough, one of the world's largest omnichannel exchanges, joins me on Tech Talks Daily. Dan has his pulse on how businesses can ensure their ads get as many eyeballs as possible. In particular, Dan has thoughts on how our desire to read through feed-based visuals will inform how we interact with advertising in the future, particularly when it comes to TV. Dan believes that the current, catalogue-style home page that most streaming services have adopted will become obsolete and that adapting to the way we consume other media through personalized feeds on channels like social will become the norm. In addition, with streaming giants such as Netflix reporting slowing subscriber growth, streamers need to find new ways to breathe life into their UX. About Dan Dan is the President of Sharethrough, overseeing market development and customer strategy. As the founding CEO of Sharethrough, Dan is a recognized leader in the industry and the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. Coming from a research background at Stanford in Behavior Design, Dan has been at the cutting edge of digital advertising since 2005, bringing together unique expertise in persuasive technology and native monetization. Dan is the founding chair of the IAB Native Advertising Committee and has spearheaded the native advertising movement since its inception in 2011. Dan has been recognized as an AdAge "Media Maven," Forbes "30 Under 30," Inc "35 Under 35″, and AdAge "40 Under 40." He is a regular speaker at advertising and technology conferences and contributing author for Forbes, AdAge, TechCrunch, and other industry publications.

White Shark Media is a digital marketing agency with more than ten years of experience managing pay-per-click campaigns with Google, Microsoft, and Facebook Ads. We provide custom PPC solutions and white label services to businesses, agencies, and organizations. At White Shark Media, Daniel Alvarado helps organizations use technology to create meaningful experiences, simplify complex tasks and generate value for their clients. Daniel joins me on Tech Talks Daily to share the best digital marketing strategies to implement in 2022. We discuss why automating marketing allows for better personalization in your marketing content while also being time-efficient. By obtaining data and segmenting your audience, you have a better chance at engaging your product or service with customers to convert them faster. We also discuss how making bids automatic instead of manual gives personnel more time to dedicate to other marketing efforts, and keeping business information up to date is critical as it can allow your business to achieve higher client acquisition rates.

Amira Learning CEO Mark Angel joins me on Tech Talks Daily to share how they are building a first-of-its-kind voice AI-based reading tutor for kids. With previous experience working at Nuance, which MSFT recently acquired for $19B, Mark's goal in developing Amira is to make every child a motivated and masterful reader. I learn how they have raised $11 million to scale up with a new app and growing customer base. We also talk about how 'Amira & the StoryCraft' has been named one of TIME's 100 Best Inventions of 2021. Only one of three inventions honored in the Education category. The list features 100 products and services that change how we live, play, work, and think about the future. Amira's Dyslexia Screener identifies students at risk of Dyslexia and other disorders. In longitudinal testing conducted by the University of Houston, the Screener missed only 1% of at-risk students. Finally, we talk about how Amira uses AI to generate the right reading intervention at the right time when an unproductive struggle helps create motivated and masterful readers.

Rob Carpenter is the CEO and Founder of Valyant AI, the first Artificially Intelligent "Digital Employee" to work directly alongside employees in customer-facing roles. For example, Valyant's AI "Holly" works in fast food restaurants to greet customers at the drive-thru post, answer questions and take food orders. The revolutionary nature of this technology is that it pulls AI from being a hidden back-office tool to something that feels like a real staff member, which humanizes a brand's personality and brings the AI experience front and center to a physical location. The major technological innovation of Holly is her Conversational AI. It allows her to speak with a human-sounding voice, to understand context, nuance and to be able to manage a free-form and wide-ranging conversation within the context of food ordering. After five years of development Valyant AI now has paying customers, can deliver up to 20% average order increase and has begun rolling out with two restaurant chains that have a combined 5,000 locations. Much like self-driving cars, Conversational AI has had a long and bumpy road to deployment, but the technology is maturing, and Valyant is at the vanguard of this new era of customer service automation for physical locations. Rob joins me in a conversation about the future of AI-human relations and its impact on the labor market - both positive and negative. We also discuss the developments in robotics and the commercialization of space travel.

At the end of 2020 Troy Gill, Senior Manager of Threat Intelligence at Zix, predicted in the 2020 Global Security Report that we would see attackers further personalizing and customizing their attacks this year. Over the last 8 months, it has come true over and over again. One such attack lived up to this prediction. The phishing attempt was posing as certificate errors for the recipient's website. What made it unique was it pulled their real certificate data and DNS (Domain Name System) A-record to tailor the phishing message to their domain. The payload URL also led to a credential harvesting site customized for their specific web platform admin page. While testing, we observed the generic WordPress admin login page and Shopify login pages (depending on the target). Troy Gill joins me on the podcast to discuss the rise of personalized phishing attacks and what businesses can to do protect themselves.