TechFirst with John Koetsier John Koetsier

How do you define the future of augmented reality?

Is it a $2,000 headset from Apple or a $1500 Oculus Quest Pro from Facebook? Or is it a device that we all hold in our hands that can cost just a few hundred dollars. A device that there are literally five billion of on this planet? AR platform Blippar is betting on the latter while not ignoring the former, and in this TechFirst we chat with the CEO Faisal Galaria about exactly why.

And, of course, an integration Blippar just built and announced for Unity, the technology that underpins half the world's games and many of its immersive 3D experiences.



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Who owns the AI that searches for the knowledge you need?

Who owns the AI that manages your home’s energy use?

Who owns the AI that lets you speak and get the music you want?

Artificial intelligence is clearly more and more central to our lives. We interact with it daily, in fact, moment to moment ... from the predictive text in our messaging ... to our web searches ... to most of our digital activity and commerce ... and in our homes.

In this episode of TechFirst, we’re chatting with someone who is building open source AI: AI that you can get the code for, use, add to and enhance, or just deploy for yourself.

Most of us won’t do that, of course, but it speaks to a future in which we might be able to get smart assistance from AIs that only work for our interests ... and not some corporations'.

Our guest in this TechFirst is Michael Lewis, CEO of Mycroft AI.



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TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/

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Who knew, but maintaining state and level of progress on massive construction jobs is actually a really hard problem. Exyn Technologies has adapted their mine mapping level 4 autonomous drones to work on construction sites and feed completion data into construction software packages.

In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Nader Elm and COO Ben Williams.



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Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.



TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

When will we solve the “last-mile” problem of robotics? We’ve made robots that can go to the bottom of the ocean, that can operate in hard radiation in a melted-down reactor, and can go to Mars, fly or drive around, do basic science ... and so much more that humans can’t ...

But so many of our robots can’t do the simplest things humans take for granted, like pick up objects, handle them, move them, and work on them. Or identify by touch if an object is a flower or a nail.

It’s kind of the last mile of robotic capability

A company that’s building undersea robots for the Navy is working on exactly this problem. 

In this TechFirst we chat with Jorgen Pedersen, who built RE2 Robotics in Pittsburgh, sold his company to Sarcos, and now serves as COO of the combined company.



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Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.



TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 



Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

Sometimes you need a big drone. Sometimes a small one will do. Some deliveries are urgent. Others are far away. For each, a slightly different drone would be the optimal solution. That's why Google sister company and Alphabet portfolio company Wing has built an 'aircraft library' ... a vault of drone types it can pull out and get in the air relatively quickly.

In this Techfirst , we chat with Wing CEO Adam Woodworth about the company's 'aircraft library,' about drone development, about what drones will do to the delivery ecosystem, and about the future of Wing.



Questions we address:


Why do we need drone delivery?
Crystal ball: how big does drone delivery become? What percentage?
You have unique aircraft: fixed-wing aircraft that are also drones … why?
You’re releasing something called the aircraft library … what is it?
What will it allow you to do?
Where will that become useful?
What are the critical technologies you’ve had to master to date to get Wing to this point?
What remains to be solved?
Expansion plans?
When will drone delivery be as normal as an Amazon truck rolling the neighborhood?



Podcast links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.


TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

Data is the nuclear waste of the web and machine learning, Ghostery CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz tells me in the last TechFirst podcast. And big tech is redefining privacy to suit their business and cut out their competitors ... not to actually deliver privacy to people.

Today, our identities are as much digital as physical, maybe more. We are where we surf, what we watch, the apps we use, the games we play, the people we engage with on social.

So privacy is a big deal and getting bigger. That's true legislatively, especially in Europe, but also technologically. Big tech has been very eager to share how privacy sensitive it is: Apple has molded its whole brand around privacy, introducing App Tracking Transparency, and Facebook is keen to say you can trust us now … we’re Meta. Google is introducing Privacy Sandbox for web and Privacy Sandbox for Android, and killing the third-party cookie … the bit of data that websites you DON’T visit can put in your browser and track you around the web.

But they all have their own definitions of privacy, which often don’t mean you giving them less data … just their competition. And Ghostery says that Google’s Manifest V3 update to Chrome will break anti-tracking and ad-blocking services.



Links:

Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/

Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.



TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ 

Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 



Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier