Business, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

Inside Magic Leap’s Quest To Remake Itself As An Ordinary Company (With a Real Product) Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

In retrospect, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz realizes that all the hype was a big mistake. “I think we were arrogant,” he says. It’s nearly 11 pm on a Monday night in late July, and we are in the back room of an Italian restaurant not far from the Fort Lauderdale beach. It’s a place he often takes visitors who make the trek from Los Angeles or San Francisco to Mickey Mouse’s Florida homeland for a demo.

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Why Big Tech's Fight Against InfoWars Is Unwinnable Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

Early Monday morning, Apple pulled several podcasts associated with notorious conspiracy theorist and protein powder peddler Alex Jones from the iTunes store. The decision opened the floodgates to a wave of suspensions that continued throughout the day. First came Facebook, which said it unpublished four pages affiliated with Jones after receiving new reports over the weekend that videos on those pages violated Facebook's policies on hate speech.

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The One Telecom Group That Does Support Net Neutrality Aug 07, 2018

Show notes

The battle lines over net neutrality are firmly drawn. On one side are internet advocacy groups, large tech companies, and most Democrats. On the other are free-market adherents, telecom companies, and most Republicans. Then there’s Charles "Chip" Pickering, a conservative Republican former member of Congress and CEO of a telecommunications-industry group called Incompas. He supports net neutrality.

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Google Faces Hurdles in China Beyond Censorship Aug 06, 2018

Show notes

In April, the founder of multibillion dollar Chinese startup Bytedance made a striking public statement. “Our product took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values,” Zhang Yiming said, in a message widely distributed by state-controlled media. He pledged that Bytedance would work harder to “promote positive energy and to grasp correct guidance of public opinion.

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So Apple Is Worth $1 Trillion. Now Comes the Hard Part Aug 06, 2018

Show notes

So it finally happened. Apple announced stellar quarterly earnings; investors liked them; the stock rose; and Apple became the first US company to surpass $1 trillion in market value. In our love for big numbers, that made it a big story. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED Contributor and president of River Twice Research. Never mind that if you adjust for inflation and go global, Apple isn’t actually the first trillion-dollar company.

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Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Wikipedia's Gender Problem Aug 03, 2018

Show notes

Miriam Adelson is an accomplished physician who’s published around a hundred research papers on the physiology and treatment of addiction, and runs a high-profile substance-abuse clinic in Las Vegas. She’s also publisher of Israel’s largest newspaper, and, with her billionaire husband Sheldon, a philanthropist and influential Republican party donor. Yet Wikipedia does not have an entry for her.

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China’s Numbers Force Google to Recalculate Its Morals Aug 03, 2018

Show notes

In 2010, Google made a moral calculus. The company had been censoring search results in China at the behest of the Communist government since launching there in 2006. But after a sophisticated phishing attack to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, Google decided to stop censoring results, even though it cost the company access to the lucrative Chinese market.

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FCC Offers Small ISPs a Boost, but a Bigger Setback Looms Aug 02, 2018

Show notes

Small internet providers expect a helping hand from the Federal Communications Commission Thursday, a move that could spur competition and perhaps lower prices. But the commission is also considering a more sweeping proposal that would hurt upstarts to the benefit of industry giants like AT&T. Both issues revolve around how much access upstarts should have to facilities and equipment owned by their bigger rivals. Thursday’s vote is about arcane rules for moving wires on utility poles.

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Playing Monopoly: What Zuck Can Learn From Bill Gates Aug 02, 2018

Show notes

Pop quiz: What tech mogul dropped out of Harvard after two years to found a tech company that conquered the world? If you answered Mark Zuckerberg, congratulations! You are correct. And if you answered Bill Gates, congratulations: You are also correct! And the interesting thing is, it’s not just Harvard. The more you compare the two, the more similar they seem. It’s as if they were cloned from the same DNA: They both were born the only boy into a wealthy family.

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Despite Pledging Openness, Companies Rush to Patent AI Tech Aug 01, 2018

Show notes

At Google’s cloud computing conference in San Francisco last week, CEO Sundar Pichai mused on his company’s commitment to openness, and artificial intelligence. “We create open platforms and share our technology because it helps new ideas get out faster,” Pichai said. Then he namechecked TensorFlow, the machine learning software Google developed and uses internally. The company open sourced the code in 2015, and it has since been downloaded more than 15 million times.

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