Microsoft this week announced it will acquire Nuance, a Boston-based speech recognition and artificial intelligence company, for around $16 billion. It’s the company’s largest acquisition after LinkedIn and a big bet on speech recognition technology. Nuance is used most in health care, and about 10,000 health care facilities worldwide use it to capture conversations between patients and doctors and transcribe them in real time. Molly speaks with Daniel Hong, a research director at Forrester. He said that a controlled environment like a clinic or doctor’s office can make the tech more accurate.

Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood

Microsoft’s latest acquisition shows speech recognition is big business

The Chinese company Ant Group does a lot of things. It provides loans, mobile payments through Alipay, credit scores, and it acts as an investment platform. Last year, it was headed for what might have been the biggest initial public offering in history, until the Chinese government abruptly canceled it. The government on Monday forced the company under the control of its central bank and demanded that it restructure as a financial holdings company. All this happened after founder and tech billionaire Jack Ma gave a speech critical of Chinese regulators last year. But the obvious story is not the whole story. Molly Wood speaks with Rui Ma, who advises investors about Chinese companies and technology.

What new regulations for Chinese giant Ant Group mean for the fintech industry abroad

Cryptocurrency is still kind of niche and a little confusing. The fact that it’s so beloved by eccentric tech billionaires doesn’t make it seem totally normal. But despite being developed as a decentralized alternative to government-created currencies, cryptocurrency is getting increasingly legit. The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is going public Wednesday on the Nasdaq. PayPal is now allowing users to pay merchants with cryptocurrency. Visa will accept one type for payments. You can now use crypto to buy a Tesla or to send money on Signal. Molly Wood speaks with Gil Luria, the director of research at D.A. Davidson, who says even though cryptocurrency is a purely digital invented asset, it’s as real as it needs to be right now.

Don’t look now, but Bitcoin is going mainstream

 As you’ve probably heard by now, the effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, was unsuccessful, though the union said it will challenge the vote. It would have affected just a fraction of Amazon’s workforce, but it captured the attention of the country at a time when e-commerce has become a lifeline and the welfare of essential workers has come under threat. Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Janice Fine, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. She said the union push at Amazon and its defeat highlight the growing role of technology in the workplace, especially Amazon’s. 

Amazon beat back a union. But questions about the role of technology at work remain.

 Last weekend, a user in a hacking forum published the personal data of about 500 million Facebook users: their email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and more. In a blog post Tuesday, Facebook said the recent data leak wasn’t a hack, but was from “malicious actors” scraping and saving publicly available information in 2019. Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Wired senior writer Lily Hay Newman. Even she has a hard time keeping track of all the data leaks from Facebook. 

Another day, another Facebook data leak

A couple of drivers for the delivery app DoorDash may have found a way to trick the algorithm that serves them jobs into offering better pay. Bloomberg profiled their effort, which is called #DeclineNow. They encourage other drivers to decline all the lowest-paid jobs to get the app to offer more money. But to make it work, they need a lot of drivers on board, and that can be tricky with gig workers. They don’t share a break room, after all. Instead, they’re getting together online in Facebook Groups and on Reddit. Meghan speaks with Lindsey Cameron, a professor of management at the Wharton School who studies gig workers and worked as an Uber driver herself.

What if gig workers could train the algorithms that determine their pay?

For those of us lucky enough to work remotely this past year, talking with colleagues has felt sort of like being in a chatroom with workplace messaging platforms full of GIFs and emoji. But bringing the culture of the internet to work can also be toxic. A recent study from Project Include found that some tech workers experienced more harassment on those platforms, particularly women, people of color and transgender and nonbinary workers. Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Caroline Sinders, who studies online harassment and founded Convocation Design + Research. She worked on the report and said the abuse took lots of forms.

Work tools feel like social media but without the moderation

For years, courts have been trying to hash out whether Google stole code from Oracle. Way back when Google was creating its Android mobile operating system, it decided to use some Java code that would make the system compatible with a lot of programs. But the Java code was owned by Oracle, which then sued, and it’s been in the courts ever since. The Supreme Court this week finally ruled that what Google did was allowed and didn’t infringe on Oracle’s copyrights. Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford, where he teaches copyright and internet law. He said the ruling means that a standard practice, of one company building on the work of another so that their products work together, didn’t get blown up.

Google’s Supreme Court win could actually benefit the little guy

The White House’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan proposes $100 billion for broadband. Right now, however, it is hard to get broadband to big parts of this country unless the infrastructure is in space. Low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations could bring high-speed internet access to those areas. Elon Musk’s Starlink is the best known, but there are a few other companies in the mix. Starlink is in beta with about 10,000 users. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood speaks with Sascha Segan, a lead analyst at PCMag who’s been following Starlink. She asked him who could benefit from this new version of satellite internet.

High-speed internet is the new space race. But do the economics work?

Votes are being counted in Bessemer, Alabama, this week from Amazon warehouse workers considering whether to unionize. Amazon has fought tooth and nail against the union effort and also against members of Congress. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren criticized its treatment of employees, and Amazon’s official Twitter account went on the attack. So did some Twitter users claiming they were very happy Amazon employees, and not all of them were real. Molly speaks with Jason Del Rey, who covers Amazon for Recode. He said this union vote is big, no matter the outcome.

Amazon had a weird week on Twitter. But the union vote is the big news.

Venture capital firms are known for being an incredibly exclusive group. The firms themselves are often small. Even smaller is the number of partners, the actual decision-makers who control hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars. At the biggest firms, there might be a dozen partners maximum. And if you’re an entrepreneur who wants some of that money, it definitely helps to have gone to college with one of those partners. Kapor Capital is trying to be more inclusive in whom it promotes and funds. One way it’s different: It finds founders primarily through a submission form on its website instead of networking. Molly speaks with Mitch Kapor, the firm’s founding partner.

Creating diverse venture capital firms is possible, if you’re willing to do it

There’s an idea that’s long been gospel in the venture capital industry, that investing in companies that have a positive social impact is a money loser — impact investing is “concessionary.” But what if it isn’t? Mitch Kapor is a well-known tech investor. He helped create the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and was an early Uber investor. But for the past decade, Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have focused on companies that they say fill a gap, whether it’s social, information or opportunity. And in 2019, their firm, Kapor Capital, reported that in fact it does make money. Lots of it. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with Mitch Kapor.

Tech investor Mitch Kapor is proving investing for social good can make money

“Artificial intelligence” is now a household term, whether it’s powering driving directions, spotting tumors in cancer patients or driving big discussions over ethics, bias, autonomous weapons or the future of work. But despite the fact that the first neural network was created in the late 1950s, a lot of those advancements have taken place over only about 10 years. In his new book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World,” New York Times tech correspondent Cade Metz writes about the history of AI and the corporate forces that have shaped it since the mid-2000s.

The corporate forces that helped shape AI

We’ve been talking about all the potential of mRNA technology — better vaccines and virus detection for all kinds of diseases. Now, let’s talk about the money because the rush is on to invest in mRNA and the whole field of synthetic biology, which approaches the body and natural systems as programmable platforms like computers. However, the history of Silicon Valley and medical tech is mixed. You remember Theranos. Just last week, the founders of a once-hot biotech firm called uBiome were charged with fraud in a similar fashion. Molly speaks with John Cumbers, the founder of SynBioBeta, a network for entrepreneurs, engineers and investors interested in synthetic biology. He says billions of dollars are flowing into the field.

Investors are throwing money at mRNA and new medical technologies. What could go wrong?

Slack rolled out a new feature this week to let people connect with anyone, even if they don’t work in the same company. One flaw became immediately obvious: Anyone with your email address could send you a connection invite and a message that could be harassing or harmful. Slack promptly changed the feature, and invites no longer contain customized messages. But it made us wonder: How can companies do a better job anticipating how features could be harmful and fix them before they get rolled out? Molly speaks with Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital.

How to imagine the worst possible use of your product, and then stop it from happening

Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood helps listeners understand the business behind the technology that's rewiring our lives. From how tech is changing the nature of work to the unknowns of venture capital to the economics of outer space, this weekday show breaks ideas, telling the stories of modern life through our digital economy. Marketplace Tech is part of the Marketplace portfolio of public radio programs broadcasting nationwide, which additionally includes Marketplace, Marketplace Morning Report and Marketplace Weekend. Listen every weekday on-air or online anytime at marketplace.org. From American Public Media. Twitter: @MarketplaceTech

hubhopper

Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood

hubhopper