Less than a year ago, Yahoo and AOL officially merged after AOL’s parent company, Verizon, bought Yahoo for more than $4 billion. Since then, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has moved on to an unannounced venture. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has had the job of blending the two companies into a digital content behemoth named Oath, vying to challenge Facebook and Google for advertising revenue. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with Armstrong about how Oath fits in the digital media landscape at the Makers conference in Los Angeles. The early February conference was sponsored in part by Oath.  

Twitter has the power to shape global conversation. And it’s become a way for marginalized communities to garner attention for the issues that matter to them. Case in point: Black Twitter. According to Pew Research, young black Americans use Twitter more than any other platform. And they’re discussing topics like racial injustice, police shootings and representation in entertainment. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with the author and activist known as Feminista Jones about the cultural significance and influence of Twitter as a platform for black activism. 

Google Chrome’s built-in ad blocker is set to start blocking some of the most annoying ads — pop ups, automatic players and the like. But while ads can be irritating, ad-tracking software might actually be worse. To get a closer look at this kind of tracking and why it should matter to consumers, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood speaks with Casey Oppenheim, co-founder and CEO of the privacy software company Disconnect. 

Tech, like a lot of other industries, is dominated by men. Women get $3 in venture capital for every $4 that men do, according to tech site Crunchbase. And only 17 percent of startups have a woman as their CEO. Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, has experienced that sexism first hand. In 2017, she was the only female CEO to take a company public in the U.S. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with Lake at the Makers conference in Los Angeles about navigating Silicon Valley’s sexist culture.  

Facial recognition software has made huge advancements in accuracy, but it has a long way to go — specifically when it comes to recognizing people of color. Commercially available software can tell the gender of a person using a photograph. According to researcher Joy Buolamwini, of the MIT Media Lab, that software is correct 99 percent of the time when it’s looking at a white male but is less than half as accurate when looking at a darker-skinned female. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with Buolamwini about her research and the human biases that creep into machine learning. 

Buying and selling things with cryptocurrencies is hard. Every time you make any transaction, it’s recorded in the blockchain, a digital ledger. That takes up a ton of resources, such as hard drive space. But a new technology called the Lightning Network could offer a way to speed up the process. It’s a huge change in how cryptocurrencies could work. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke about it with Timothy Lee, a reporter at the tech news site Ars Technica.   

When the markets are extremely volatile, it is common to want to find a scapegoat. And you might be thinking: It’s got to be the algorithms, right? Two kinds are used in Wall Street trading: those that optimize trades that humans make and those that take risks on their own. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Michael Kearns, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, who creates algorithms that are used on Wall Street. He said that generally, the algorithms are not to blame for drops in the market. 

At the heart of every new business is its name — domain name, in fact. We might be a mobile internet kind of world, but the website is still king, and your URL still matters.  Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Jen Sale, a domain broker for Evergreen, which specializes in acquiring and selling premium one-word domain sites, like robot-dot-com.  

In the future, what will make us choose one product over another? It probably won’t be things like screen size or brightness. It’ll be more subtle attributes, like which phone is “smarter” than another. Apple is a company that’s known for making great products, but will those devices continue to be the best five years from now? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks about it with Forrester analyst Julie Ask.