Marketplace Tech®

It's been a big story that tech companies are staying private longer. And there are fewer and fewer tech IPOs. It seemed like the drought was lifting: Uber and Lyft have filed for initial public offerings, and there were rumors that Airbnb, Pinterest and Slack might finally pull the trigger. But three weeks into 2019 and the Securities and Exchange Commission isn't picking up the phone. The SEC lawyers and accountants who work on IPOs are shut down along with the government. And if this shutdown goes on much longer, the big names might be fine, but it could chill the whole tech IPO resurgence. Molly Wood talks about it with Corrie Driebusch, a reporter who covers markets for The Wall Street Journal.

Today's show is sponsored by Triple Byte_JD and Amazon Web Services.

Internet-connected doorbells with cameras built in are becoming very popular. Amazon-owned Ring is the best-known product. Google also has the Nest Hello. But the phenomenon of doorbell video has privacy experts worried. There's the potential for misuse and abuse of these home surveillance devices by people who are shaming each other or labeling people as suspicious. And the companies that make them may have access to video at a level customers don't understand. Molly Wood talks with Laura Norén, director of research at Obsidian Security. She says part of the problem is that owners of video doorbells are filming a lot more territory than the terms of service say they should.

Today's show is sponsored by the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and Indeed.

In yesterday's show we talked about how advertisers are not leaving Facebook. But lots of them are migrating from Facebook proper to another platform it owns: Instagram. One analyst estimates that ads on Instagram will account for 70 percent of Facebook's new revenue by 2020. And the most exciting thing for the company is Stories, the little posts that expire after 24 hours. Instagram may have stolen the idea from Snapchat, but it's working. There are even Stories on Facebook now. Mark Rabkin is vice president of ads and business platform at Facebook. In the second part of his conversation  with host Molly Wood, he says people are posting over a billion Stories a day, and advertisers better get on board.

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

You, or people you know, might have quit Facebook over the last year or so. But you know who hasn't left? Advertisers. Facebook is still the second-biggest digital ad platform in the world, just behind Google. And in 2018, a lot of us realized just how Facebook uses our posts, our connections, photos, location, the quizzes we take, to help advertisers target us. But there have been changes. The past year brought the Cambridge Analytica scandal, new privacy rules in Europe and days of getting yelled at by Congress. Now Facebook says it's trying to clean up and streamline what it calls the "data supply chain": where the data comes from, who gets access to it and how it gets used. Molly Wood talks about it with Mark Rabkin, vice president of ads and business platform at Facebook.

Today's show is sponsored by Indeed.

If you ask the major U.S. telecom companies, they'll tell you the next generation of mobile wireless technology, 5G, has arrived. But things are a little messy right now. Carriers still might mean different things when they say "5G." There aren't any 5G phones that operate on 5G mobile networks. And when there are, how much is the service going to cost? The big carriers are plowing ahead because they'll make a ton of money with business opportunities far beyond just our talk, text and data plans. Molly Wood talks about the promise of 5G with Nicki Palmer, chief network officer at Verizon.

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