Business, Spoken

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Innovation Can Fix Government, Sure. Either That or Break It Mar 29, 2017

Show notes

You don’t need to be in government to know how slowly it moves. In business, that kind of inefficiency makes entrepreneurial mouths water. So it’s no surprise that America’s businessman-turned-president wants to speed things up. Now President Trump appears to want to pick up his predecessor’s legacy.

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I Took the AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting to Get Into Mar 28, 2017

Show notes

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning. Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app.

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The Senate Prepares to Send Internet Privacy Down a Black Hole Mar 27, 2017

Show notes

Today, while you’re not watching, the Senate could gut rules protecting your internet privacy. Last year the Federal Communications Commission passed a set of strict privacy regulations that ban broadband internet providers from selling your browsing data without your consent.

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Intel’s Bold Plan to Reinvent Computer Memory (and Keep It a Secret) Mar 24, 2017

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Intel just unleashed a new kind of computer memory it believes will fundamentally change the way the world builds computers. But it won’t tell the world what’s inside. The company calls this new creation 3D XPoint—pronounced “three-dee cross-point”—and this week, after touting the stuff for a year-and-a-half, Intel finally pushed it into the market.

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Forget Bitcoin. The Blockchain Could Reveal What’s True Today and Tomorrow Mar 23, 2017

Show notes

As far back as the 1880s, people stood on the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange taking bets on political elections, and newspapers would report the odds as a way of predicting the results at the polls. In the years since, economists refined the concept, and more recently, prediction markets have tapped into the wisdom of the crowds via the internet, forecasting everything from presidential races to sporting events to stock prices.

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Germany’s Flawed Plan to Fight Hate Speech by Fining Tech Giants Millions Mar 22, 2017

Show notes

The way tech companies deal with online harassment and abuse is broken. YouTube allows anti-Semitism to stay live. Twitter waffles as targeted harassment runs rampant. Facebook takes down an iconic photo that shouldn’t be banned. Now one German politician is tired of letting platforms make excuses.

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At SXSW, Tech Reckons With the Problems It Helped Create Mar 21, 2017

Show notes

Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW’s next breakout star. Or at the very least, its next Meerkat. But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover.

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It Begins: Bots Are Learning to Chat in Their Own Language Mar 20, 2017

Show notes

Igor Mordatch is working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator.

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The Initial Coin Offering, the Bitcoin-y Stock That’s Not Stock—But Definitely a Big Deal Mar 17, 2017

Show notes

Next month, a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital plans to do something that could change the way companies get funded—and perhaps even the way they operate. Instead of an Initial Public Offering, in which a company sells stock via a regulated exchange like Nasdaq, the San Francisco-based VC firm is making an Initial Coin Offering, selling its own digital token as a way of raising money for its latest venture fund. Anyone who buys a token will be buying into the fund.

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Travis Kalanick Doesn’t Need a New COO. He Needs a New CEO Mar 16, 2017

Show notes

Have you heard? Uber is hiring. CEO Travis Kalanick wants a chief operating officer. Heapparently came to this decision in the midst of the company’s worst PR crisis yet. Accusations of a misogynistic company culture,aGoogle lawsuit, and allegations that it misled regulators with phantom rides leave the company in an almost permanent state of damage control.Hiring a COO almost certainly is Kalanick’s attempt to show that he, and his company, can grow up.

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