Marketplace Tech®

Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed that perhaps tech companies that make lots of money collecting and monetizing our personal information should share that wealth. He said that people who live in California should get paid a data dividend. Host Molly Wood talks with Owen Thomas, the business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who recently wrote that the data dividend idea is overly simplistic and has been tried before.

Today's show is sponsored by Evident, Brother Printers and Indeed.

If you need a ride somewhere, Uber or Lyft will match you up with a car and a driver. If you're a landlord renting a house, you post it on Zillow and renters can find you. Tech has made it really easy for most of us to get matched up with what we need with just a few clicks. But like so much technology, this convenience is not evenly distributed. A new platform called Lease Up is tackling that problem by better matching homeless people with housing in Los Angeles. The website makes it easier for landlords to list affordable housing units and for nonprofits to find those homes for clients.

Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

You know how there's this sense that if Amazon gets into your line of work, you're in trouble? Well, hello, digital advertising. Amazon has been slowly building up its ad business, letting brands target ads to people on Amazon.com and its other sites, like the live-streaming platform Twitch, IMDB, Zappos and all across the web. Its pitch is simple: Amazon is telling advertisers that the best predictor of what you, the consumer, are going to buy is what you've already bought. A report out today from research firm eMarketer says Amazon has been a distant third behind Facebook and Google and is starting to look like a dangerous third. Host Molly Wood talks about it with Monica Peart, senior forecasting director for eMarketer.

Today's show is sponsored by Topo Athletic, Evident and Indeed.

By now, if we’re doing our job right, you should kind of get how digital advertising works. Companies collect information about you — like where you live, your age, what you buy online, what websites you visit and much more. And they use that information to target you with ads they think you will like so you'll buy their stuff. But you may not know that this is also happening on television. It's called addressable advertising, and it means your cable or satellite TV provider is showing you ads on your TV that your neighbor might not see. Right now only a small number of the ads you see are targeted ads, but it's evolving fast because the money is good. Molly Wood talks about it with Tim Peterson, a senior reporter at Digiday. She asked him how the tech works.

Today's show is sponsored by WellFrame, Nulab  and Lenovo for Small Business.

As facial recognition software spreads, it brings the challenge of diversity along with it. So far, programs identify male, white faces far more accurately than they do black women, for example. A new IBM project aims to change that. Diversity in Faces is a data set of a million faces pulled from public domain pictures on Flickr. It gives computers a lot more to look at and process, and it introduces a way to better measure diversity in faces. John R. Smith is an IBM fellow and lead scientist of Diversity in Faces. He tells Jed Kim that there's nothing else like this.

Today's show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.