Marketplace Tech
1,011 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 1.2K ratingsMonday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that’s constantly changing.
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Episodes
Waze wants to make carpooling a thing
October 21, 2019 10:30 - 10 minutes - 11.8 MBAfter a decade of trying to improve traffic, the real-time mapping app Waze has spent the last year trying to get its users to carpool. The app hooks riders up with drivers who are commuting in the same direction, and the riders pay a small fee that goes to the drivers. Waze said it’s gotten about half a million people using the carpool feature, but it’s not an easy sell. Noam Bardin, CEO of Waze, said everyone knows traffic is bad for your health, your life and the environment.
Free speech on the internet is: A) complicated B) complicated C) complicated D) all of the above
October 18, 2019 10:30 - 11 minutes - 11.8 MBIt has been quite the week for speech online. Twitter introduced new guidelines on how to deal with world leaders on its platform after Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris called on the platform to ban President Donald Trump. On this segment of “Quality Assurance,” Molly Wood takes a deep dive on platforms and regulating speech. She spoke with Daphne Keller, who is at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
Tesla’s new parked-car trick: Press a button on your phone, the car comes to you. Or close. Maybe.
October 17, 2019 10:30 - 9 minutes - 11.8 MBTesla’s latest over-the-air software update for its cars is perfect fodder for online viral videos. It added a feature the company calls “smart summon.” Owners use an app on their phone to summon their cars from about 200 feet away, and have it drive to them all by itself with nobody inside — just hold down a button. Ars Technica’s Timothy Lee, who watched 100 videos Tesla owners have uploaded using the smart summon feature, said the results seem to vary.
The U.S. is still exporting sensitive tech to China despite a White House clampdown
October 16, 2019 10:30 - 7 minutes - 11.8 MBU.S. companies export tens of billions of dollars in sensitive technology every year — AI computer chips, drones or encryption software. They have to apply for licences to do it, and those approvals have dropped in recent years, while rejections have risen. Matt Drange, an investigative reporter at The Information, sifted through the data to see what it can tell us about tech trade.
Some ways to keep the power on in California’s fire season
October 15, 2019 10:30 - 6 minutes - 11.8 MBPG&E cut power to more than 700,000 people and businesses last week in Northern California cities as a way to prevent fires from sparking in dry, windy weather. But is a chaotic blackout the best solution? Marketplace’s Ben Bradford tells host Amy Scott that there are alternatives that could prevent this kind of disruption in the future.
Can an app make the call on baseball umpires?
October 14, 2019 10:30 - 7 minutes - 11.8 MBWith the World Series just around the corner, we’re hearing a lot about players’ stats. But another issue is when an umpire gets a call wrong. Major League Baseball is trying to make those instances less frequent. Over the summer, robot umpires helped officiate a minor league game. The goal is not only to improve accuracy of the calls, but to speed up the game and get more butts in the seats. But Boston University finance professor Mark Williams thinks there’s a way to use an app to make hum...
Do fake images need to look convincing to be convincing?
October 11, 2019 10:30 - 7 minutes - 11.8 MBChristye Sisson, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, is working with the Department of Defense to help build a sophisticated tool that can identify fake images. She and her students act like the bad guys — doing painstaking work to develop the most convincing fake images they can. They’ve learned a lot about what it takes to fool people, including that maybe they don’t need to work so hard, at least on social media.
Amazon wants the public to know its warehouses are fun enough for the Girl Scouts
October 10, 2019 10:30 - 7 minutes - 11.8 MBAmazon warehouses are key to the company’s operations. Items arrive, get sorted and are packaged and shipped off. But they don’t have a reputation for being great places to work. For example, last year, there were those reports about employees urinating in bottles at a U.K. warehouse to avoid taking bathroom breaks. Now Amazon is offering more public tours of its warehouses. The company says it wants to be transparent about how it operates and to inspire kids. We tagged along with a bunch o...
Does encryption help with privacy, or does it violate public safety?
October 09, 2019 10:30 - 5 minutes - 11.8 MBLaw enforcement officials in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, including U.S. Attorney General William Barr, wrote an open letter to Facebook last week asking it to hold off on plans to expand end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger. That kicked off a heated debate about privacy and public safety.
The best way to counter hate speech online might be to have a bot call it out
October 08, 2019 10:54 - 5 minutes - 11.8 MBResearchers at Intel and University of California, Santa Barbara, are proposing a new idea to use AI to identify hate speech and then create an automated response to those messages, like pointing out that the words used could be offensive or warning people that they are violating terms of service.
YouTube isn’t fun for parents trying to shield their kids from scary stuff
October 07, 2019 10:56 - 6 minutes - 11.8 MBThere is a lot of appropriate content on YouTube for kids, and there’s a whole lot that is not appropriate for anyone. But kids are wily, and they will find ways to watch. Jed Kim spoke with Common Sense Media Editor-in-Chief Jill Murphy, who says a whole lot of families are struggling with this.