On this week’s edition of the Futurum Tech Podcast we are talking about deepfakes and the influence they will have on society. We also talk about the HPE Open House, Intel’s new price reduction on its chips, cybersecurity and Microsoft’s big launch this past week. We will round this out talking about a new Zero Day and then finally, what is government and society going to do to solve this deepfake problem? This and more on Futurum’s Tech Podcast.
Our Main Dive
Deepfake videos are video forgeries that make people seem to be doing or saying things they didn’t actually do or say. As you might imagine these manipulated videos can have a big impact on people who are “featured” in them. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed into law a couple of laws aimed at affording some protection as it relates to deepfake videos used in both politics and porn. AB 730 is intended to offer protection to political candidates, and makes it illegal to distribute deepfake videos intended to deceive voters and discredit a political candidate with 60 days of an election. AB 602 is a bill that provides protection to Californians whose likenesses are used in pornographic videos without their consent, giving them the right to sue.
Our main dive conversation touches on these protections afforded by the state of California, often a front runner when it comes to initiatives of this nature, but also the future as it relates to deepfakes and the dangers to consumers and organizations alike that this kind of manipulated video poses.
Our Fast Five
We dig into this week’s interesting and noteworthy news:
- Microsoft made some big announcements this last week, including the launch of its Surface Duo, it’s two-screen phone operating on either the Android OS or the Windows OS. Daniel covered some of the additional hardware Microsoft is rolling out, including some custom chips coming by way of Qualcomm for its Surface Pro X. Exciting stuff.
- Make the “V” sign in images that you pose for and share online? Might want to stop that once you know that that simple gesture could give away personal data by way of your fingerprints. Experts claim that for photos taken within a distance of 1.5 meters to the camera, fingerprint information can be 100 percent disclosed. For photos shot from between 1.5 to 3 meters’ distance, 50 percent accuracy can be expected.
- Intel has made some significant price reductions to its Core i9 X-series processors which would have a big impact on the high-end desktop market. AMD is likely not happy with this, but consumers will be.
- Amazon continues to wrap consumers in its “warm” embrace with the debut of the Kindle Kids product line. The Kindle Kids concept is coming to Amazon’s Kindle e-reader and is conveniently bundled with a free year of Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited subscription service (and a 2-year replacement guarantee should the device break – score for parents). That FreeTime subscription is Amazon’s “all-in-one” subscription that gives kids access to movies, educational apps, TV shows, kid-friendly books, Audible books and games that are compatible on not only Amazon’s Fire devices, but also on Android, iOS and Kindle devices. Once the free year has ended, the price of that subscription is $2.99/month for Prime members, 4.99/mo non-Prime members. It also comes in family plan pricing for multiple users at $6.99/month for Prime and $9.990/month for non-Prime members. Before long, users will never have to leave the Amazon ecosystem for any kind of reading, education, gaming, or entertainment. Just the way Amazon wants it.
- Daniel attended the intimate HPE Analyst Open House event in San Jose this past week, where HPE’s Antonio Neri was a warm and personal host and shared insights as to where the company is going, near and long term. Daniel walks us through some of what was shared there in our podcast conversation, and also takes a deeper dive on that topic here: HPE Analyst Event: Experience the Key to Its Long Term Strategy
Tech Bites
For the Tech Bites portion of our podcast, we cover the Android Zero Day vulnerability. For more information on the devices potentially impacted and what to do to protect yourself, read more.
Crystal Ball: Future-um Predictions and Guesses
In our Crystal Ball segment of the Futurum Tech Podcast, we circle back to the issue of deepfake videos and cybersecurity and talk about what’s next in terms of the protections technology and technology giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and beyond can (and should) afford consumers who will at some point be impacted by deepfakes. When you consider there are 2 billion photos uploaded to the web daily, verifying images at scale is a massive undertaking. But it will happen.
Transcript:
Shelly Kramer: Welcome to this week’s episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast. This is your host, Shelly Kramer, and I’m joined today by my colleague, Daniel Newman. We’re excited about this week’s show. We’re going to talk about California planting a flag in deep fakes as it relates to politics and porn. We’re going to talk a little bit about Microsoft and some exciting news on that front, and we’re going to talk about cybersecurity and some other really exciting things.
Before we get started, I want to step back for a minute and give you our standard disclaimer that this show is intended for educational purposes and informational purposes. We’re going to talk about a lot of publicly traded companies and we will share thoughts and opinions, but those are intended for entertainment value only, and so please don’t use those for anything else. That said, we are going to talk now about California and what’s going on as it relates to deep fakes, and what the state is doing to try to protect against the use of deep fakes in politics and porn.
Daniel, welcome.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, excited to be here, always. Did you say porn? I know on this show that-
Shelly Kramer: Got your attention.
Daniel Newman: I know on this show that we definitely like to be a little controversial and I stopped listening when you said that, but I’m back, and I’m now focused on the topic at hand. Yeah, deep fakes. What an interesting topic and something that as of now kind of seems to only affect people who are maybe celebrities or politicians primarily. Of course it’s probably happening in smaller capacities in other areas, but it seems like it’s becoming more pervasive, Shelly, and probably something that we need to be paying attention to and maybe be worrying about.
Shelly Kramer: Well, I think so. And I think that the thing about deep fakes, it’s kind of like a security breach. I think the deep fakes is something that you don’t pay attention to until it happens to you. And when and if it happens to you, it can totally destroy your life.
For those of you not familiar, deep fakes or video forgeries, and they make people appear to do or say things that they actually didn’t do. They use a type of facial recognition technology that allows the people creating these fakes to kind of mash up identity so well that you don’t question it’s truth. Some of you may have seen this, an example I know in recent times there was a deep fake video done of Nancy Pelosi, there have been other deep fake videos with other famous people and politicians, but that’s the one that comes immediately to mind that happened recently enough that you might remember.
The other thing that people use deep fake videos for is to take ordinary people like celebrities and take those and create graphic pornography, which when you think about it, it’s bad enough to be a celebrity or a politician to have this happen, but if you’re just an ordinary average person and somebody that you dated or were married to or that just doesn’t like you is knowledgeable enough, they can actually take some video footage of you and insert your image into pornographic video. When you step back from that a minute and think about the potential ramifications, I think it would make, certainly it gives me pause.
Daniel Newman: It’s definitely one of those things where the tools and technologies are going to come down market. There’s no question about it. It’s kind of like everyone became a photo editor, then everyone became a movie editor, and now that everyone knows how to edit movies, well it’s not that hard to take a little video and a little AI and massage them together with a little editing ,and all of a sudden you have videos of people doing things that, well A, they’re not actually doing. Taking things like speed, the speed of the video. I know you talked about Nancy Pelosi, and slowing it, and manipulating it to make an ordinary conversation sound like words had been slurred.
We’ve even seen some of those funny quote unquote deep fakes, I think it’s the Jay Leno show. It’s not really a deep fake, but it’s kind of where this all started, right? Where they took the image of someone and then put the mouth right behind it. Now what’s happening is that was sort of obtuse that you could definitely tell it wasn’t actually that person talking. But as the tech gets better and better, it’s becoming to the point where you really don’t know. And for everybody, for you and for me, it could come down to things like corporate espionage. Do you want to take out your biggest competitor? Let’s make a deep fake of a CEO doing something completely inappropriate. A scorned lover? Let’s send a deep fake of someone doing something inappropriate because you happen to have a lot of content. So you take all that content and you use technology, and all of a sudden you basically can really ruin and destroy lives. It’s now basically a technology that sets people up to not only make up false allegations, but to actually validate them through questionable sources that are going to be really hard to validate.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, it really is a big deal. A study was released today that showed that 96% of the more than 14,000 deep fake videos that researchers have today identified online were pornographic in nature. So 96%. And of those pornographic deep fakes, the subjects of all of them were women. No real surprises there. And very commonly popular actresses and musicians. So I think that the danger here is that, as you indicated, as you nodded to earlier, we’re a heartbeat away from people realizing how easy it is to do this in so many instances. So I think as consumers of information, it’s kind of a warning to vet first. Vet everything before you just believe something that you see.
But anyway, the news that we really haven’t touched on very much is that last week California’s governor signed a couple of bills, one of which makes it illegal to distribute manipulated videos that are intended to discredit a political candidate and deceive voters within 60 days of an election. Then he had signed another bill that gives Californians the right to sue someone who creates deep fakes that place them in pornographic material without consent. So while these are really kind of baby steps, what they are at least some state today kind of planting a flag in this space, admitting that it’s a problem and trying to do something to put some protections in place.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I read about this and I thought it was encouraging. As you said, Shelly, it wasn’t a massive leap, but just starting to put some rules in place to protect people’s likeness, and at the very least to say, “Hey, if you do this, there is a consequence.” We talk about things like how libel and slander have laws. So if you write something that’s not true or you say something that’s not true and it causes damages, there’s consequences to it. Well, this is an extraordinary version of that, because now it’s, you’re basically putting things in and creating confusion. If there’s one thing we know is people really have a hard time discerning between real and fake. That’s been quite obvious through the last five to ten years of the proliferation of social and digital media.
So you could have a video that’s deep faked of a celebrity or at some point yourself that comes out and it could be fake and everyone, quote unquote, the source validators could acknowledge it being fake. But people who happened to see it in passing in their streams on a different social channel, they don’t often take the time to come back and make sure that what they saw was real or fake. They don’t often take the time to even click on the links to read and make sure. So what ends up happening is ultimately all that content becomes-
Shelly Kramer: Very dangerous.
Daniel Newman: It’s dangerous. Yeah.
Shelly Kramer: Very dangerous.
Daniel Newman: I’m trying to think of the right words, but fake news is dangerous. That’s a slightly different discussion, but I guess you could say deep fakes are dangerous because society will not be able to discern it. You really got to hope that technology is going to get built on top of video that is suspicious quickly to handle this because I don’t necessarily trust our regulators and governing bodies to do that.
Shelly Kramer: Well, I think we’re very far away from being able to handle any kind of regulation. It’s like you said, even with news, when I’m scrolling through an information stream, whether it’s on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else, I stop and I look at the source and I might go and vet the source, and all that sort of thing. I think that we are probably, we’re not any smarter than anybody else, but we’re probably the exception to the rule as it relates to ordinary average consumers, just because we’re so immersed in this space and know how easy it is to kind of get tricked by some of these sources.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. With that, we’re going to dive into our fast five topics. Right now I think we’re going to talk about an exciting launch from Microsoft. So take that away, Daniel.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been a week, but I don’t think hardware launches from Microsoft are every day as software launches. Last week in New York, the company had an intimate event. I was invited but could not attend. It was only about 200 people, including Trevor Noah and some big tech geeky celebrity types that were in the attendance for the company to launch their new, they have a new Duo, which is a foldable device. It’s going to be powered by Android phone from Microsoft. Interesting. A new Neo, a similar larger format, Windows powered foldable device. They had their new Surface Pro. Surface Pro 7, Pro X, Surface laptop. They had a series of other updates, and then they also came out with the Surface earbuds, which are these really interesting looking circular, almost like large gauge in-ear buds with the big surface area for manipulating and handling gestures.
It was a huge launch for the company who has been obviously entering the hardware peripherals slowly, steadily and surely at that top end of market. A couple of the most notable features, besides the phone, was a new Qualcomm powered ACPC, which is going to be the Pro X. It’s going to have all day battery life and always on connectivity. Also they had a new chip sets going into the Pro 7 from Intel and the laptops now got an AMD version. You can definitely tell the company’s making a much bigger play into hardware. So it’s going to be really an interesting one to follow.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, just looking at the picture of this device, I always want every device, but this one looks really cool. The fact that it’s powered by Android I think is brilliant. Not everybody loves the Windows operating system. A lot of people like Android, and I think that’s pretty cool.
Daniel Newman: Definitely.
Shelly Kramer: All right, well thank you for that. I am going to touch on the, since we kind of started off this topic on sort of cybersecurity issues, I’m going to touch on the danger of flipping the V sign in photos. Part of the reason this is top of mind for me is because I have teenagers and apparently flicking the V sign is something that is critically important in every image that is ever taken of them. So when I saw some news a couple of weeks ago about flicking that V sign in photos and how that could potentially be a security risk.
I think that people don’t think about this, but cameras today, even iPhone cameras or device cameras, not necessarily iPhones only, are very, very good. And that it is possible today for photos that are taken within 1.5 meters of the camera, allows users fingerprint information to be 100% disclosed. That came out during China’s cybersecurity week, and that’s kind of a big deal. Anyway, thought I’d pass that out.
Daniel Newman: Holy crow. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flicked the V sign.
Shelly Kramer: Stop it.
Daniel Newman: I’m serious. Getting my fingerprints is probably a lot more valuable than our kids.
Shelly Kramer: No, absolutely. But people don’t think about it. And so when you start just looking at photos that your friends are sharing and think about that, it just makes perfect sense. It’s so easy. So we need to be careful with that.
With that, we’re going to talk now about what’s going on with Intel.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. So really quickly on this one, Intel had a series of price slashes on their new Next Generation Core i9 X series processors. Long and short on this one is, it’s been a really tumultuous period for not just Intel but for the entire chip industry. We’ve had shortages, we’ve had constant competition. So for the last few years, AMD has had their Ryzen Threadripper series that has been basically coming down in price and offering really high end specs and is found AMD chips in more of the what I would call the high end enterprise and personal PC and desktop space. So Intel, after kind of a long period of allowing a little bit of market share to slip, probably mostly because of having shortages of product, has come back and taken their i9 X series and slashed the price by almost 50%. So comparatively speaking, they’ve now actually come down to pricing that is at or below where AMD has been at.
This is just ahead of an expected update and launch from AMD. So basically putting their competitor a little bit on their heels, or toes you could say, to now have to respond to Intel’s pricing. Now, Intel still dominates in a lot of markets, but in the PC space, AMD has had a lot of success and has been able to take some market share during the shortages. This is going to be really interesting to watch the device makers and OEMs at that top end who have been perhaps leaning more towards AMD over the past few years to potentially come back to Intel, or at the very least force AMD to make a response and drop prices even further. Which again, may not excite any of us as analysts, but as consumers this is going to mean better PCs for less money.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I think it’s very exciting and it’ll be really interesting to see what happens on that front. Well, I am interested this week with more news coming out of Amazon. Amazon is just coming for everything and everybody and it’s so interesting to watch. So Amazon’s been selling kid friendly editions of its Fire tablets for a while now, so that’s nothing new, but it’s bringing a kids’ edition concept to its Kindle eReader, which I would assume goes head to head against iPads and other devices that we might put in our kid’s hands to give us a few moments of sanity. What’s interesting to me about this is this new Kindle kids edition is bundled with a free year of Amazon’s unlimited subscription service that’s called Free Time Unlimited. And it also comes with a free two year replacement guarantee in case the device breaks. If you’re a parent, especially a parent of younger kids, I think that’s probably something that gets your attention.
But this bundle costs about $110, shipping at the end of October, and you can buy that same hardware without all the extras packaged in for $90. But for an extra $20, I don’t know why you probably wouldn’t go ahead and buy the bundle. But what’s interesting to me is that with all the new streaming services coming out, Apple and Disney and everybody under the sun getting into the streaming business, Amazon already has a lot of our intention anyway, I think a lot of consumers’ attention. But this new bundle that includes things like kid friendly books, movies, TV shows, educational apps, Audible books and games that are compatible on Fire, Android, iOS and Kindle devices, and it costs about $2.99 a month for this bundle of software subscription for Prime members. Yet another reason to be a Prime member. $5 a month for non-Prime members, and a family plan for multiple children is $6.99 for Prime members and $9.99 for non-Prime members.
I think that it just is one more reason to stick with Amazon, to go with Amazon to stream with Amazon. And I think that it’s very interesting because of course the more we integrate Amazon and Amazon’s ecosystem into our lives, of course, the more information and data Amazon has about us.
Daniel Newman: Oh yeah, that’s exactly what they want. But to their credit, they make the offerings appealing Shelly, so that people generally say, “Hey, I’m willing to trade for that. That sounds pretty good.”
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely. And with that, we’re going to talk about your time at the HPE analyst event, which I think sounds pretty awesome.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. More than just even an analyst event, HP held what was called the HP Open House, and they invited 20 analyst influencer types to their event for, it was about a day and a half. And what was really interesting is at this event, without much NDA, the company really focused on putting its top executives in front of us to hear the strategy, the direction of the company and to give some clear insights into where the company is going. We’ll put in the show notes, I wrote a fairly extensive piece covering the takeaways because since this is a fast five, I can’t dive into all of them.
But a couple of quick points that I did want to make here was one, it was very impressive how much access to executives the company gave. Antonio Neri, the CEO of the company, spent the entire evening at dinner with the small group talking to many of us one on one or in a small group setting, and then came back the next day to open up for about an hour and a half, about 30 minutes of presentation and about an hour of Q and A. And then took us on a tour of this new corporate headquarters. Personally took us on the tour, spent the time with us, showed us around, brought us into his office, and even made coffee for each of us at his at little Italian coffee machine, which was crazy. Talk about a level of personal. I don’t know how his schedule could have been cleared. 20 plus billion dollar company.
A couple things that he basically said that I thought were interesting quotes, noteworthy was one, his belief on the future, edge centric, cloud enabled, and everything consumed as a service. I’ve written a lot about this, but by 2022 the company intends to deliver everything as a service. The other thing that he said that’s worth noting for this fast five was the company’s really going big on hybrid cloud and their plan is to basically be able to deliver the lowest cost per workload in a true hybrid environment, again, delivered as a service.
This as a service thing is super important because the company’s putting its fingerprint on the world and saying, “Yes, hyperscalers, yes, SaaS.” SaaS companies deliver as a service and that’s been popular, but traditionally OEMs and hardware, everything’s been enterprise purchased, licensed, hardware, monolithic type. They want to go against that. The company understands that it’s not the future and they’re trying to pivot, which is a big move, a risky move, but one that I think is going to set the company apart in the long run.
Sorry, that was a little bit slower of a fast five, but so much content to cover. Hope you’ll check out our article on futurumresearch.com
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I think that was a lot, and I do think that those personalized moments that, whether it’s CEOs or PR teams or anybody, can make and bring people a little closer into their world on that personal note makes a huge difference. It’s a very smart strategic move.
We are going to now move to the Tech Bites section of our show. Probably some of the most important news that we’ve seen the last couple of days is the zero day vulnerability that is impacting Pixel, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi and other Android phones. I don’t know a ton about it. I know this was just announced yesterday. This was discovered on certain phones running Android 8X or later. It’s found in Android’s kernel code and could allow a hacker to gain root access over a phone. It would allow then someone to steal data from the handset, to make changes to the OS, and other things that are fairly dangerous. The security team reported that they see this being used right now in real world attacks that are happening. Do you have anything to add on that front, Daniel? You know any more about this than I do?
Daniel Newman: I thought it was really interesting to check out the mix of devices, Shelly, that actually were noted as vulnerable. So first of all, if you’ve updated your phone in the last year, you’re probably okay. And if you’ve got a newer phone you’re probably okay because, with the exception of the Huawei P20, which I believe is still one of their newer models, the only really new Samsung is the S9. If you’re still on an S8 or 7, you’re probably talking three years old or older at this point.
I think the bigger theme here is that continuously there is issues with vulnerabilities with updates. So much of the onus is put on us as consumers and users to keep devices up to date if we don’t want to make them vulnerable, and I think people don’t often realize this. I certainly can be a little bit lax at times about updating devices. I always get around to it, but sometimes the conveniences of-
Shelly Kramer: Not updating.
Daniel Newman: Stopping everything, shutting everything down, worrying about did I have all my documents saved, not wanting to reopen my different tabs. The point is, it’s very easy for people to just get into a bad habit and end up not updating and then suddenly having a vulnerability even on a newer device. So it’s always great when teams like Google’s Project Zero team are able to discover this and get it out there and get it patched, but as we’ve seen here with Google, with Intel, with Microsoft, with Apple, there has been vulnerabilities everywhere. And going back to where we started this show, Shelly, on deep fakes, on different technologies that can be hacked, it’s basically if it can be hacked, there are people out there that will try and hack it.
And that’s exactly what’s going on here is there are people that are consistently looking for opportunities to break into devices. If even a few million people of the hundreds of millions of devices out there have software that’s not updated that provide hackers with vulnerabilities to access, the hackers will look to access them and to utilize them to get at your data or steal your crypto or your money or anything they can get their hands on. So a little less to the specifics of this instance, but it just shows every time you turn your head, another one of these types of issues are going to pop up. Really the onus is on us as consumers to keep up with it, update our devices, constantly be on the lookout for updates and make sure we never let them sit too long, knowing that if we do, there’s a lot of risks associated.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I agree. It’s funny, I was reading an article today about this particular thing, and a comment that somebody left was, “This is not an issue. All Android users are extremely tech savvy, so there is no way any Android user could have been affected.” I’m thinking, no. Anyway, I thought-
Daniel Newman: Yes, everybody that uses and Android-
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, whatever.
Daniel Newman: Is also a developer.
Shelly Kramer: Well, and I do have to say that my personal, I’m the most tech savvy as I’m sure you are too, of most of your friends outside of the industry, that is, and people on our team, and people are very lazy and very sloppy about updating their phones. Sometimes when you download a new operating system, it kind of changes functionality and that’s sort of irritating because you have to learn how to do something differently. But I will say I update my phone all the time. It’s kind of on an auto update. I don’t do as great of a job on my laptops, but I try to. It really is important, bottom line, that your security is in your hands. Update your devices on a regular basis, even if you have to calendar a reminder to make that happen.
So wrapping this up, we’re going to go back to what we call our crystal ball. That really is looking at what is happening in the cybersecurity space, especially as it relates to deep fakes and how easy it is to generate those things and really mess with people and people’s lives, and that sort of thing. Daniel, what do you see happening in the next, I don’t know, even in the next years’ time frame as it relates to imagery on the web and what’s going to happen in terms of protection and awareness and that sort of thing? You think this is a big deal and the people are going to start paying attention to it, or not so big of a deal?
Daniel Newman: I think we’re going to see a sprawl of new technologies. I don’t know if it’ll happen in the next year, but I’m thinking within the next 24 months we’re going to start to see some sort of growth of machine learning and AI tools that can basically discern what they’re seeing more quickly than the human eye. Much like we’ve been put up in front of in many conferences, Shelly, where they say spot the fake of a painting or of a song which was created by AI. Well, I think to some extent AI is going to be the best at telling when it’s AI. Since deep fake is basically a product of AI, we’re going to see tools generated and then we’re going to somehow see, like we get in our email for spam, we’re going to get some sort of warning that this is suspicious.
I’m not saying they’re going to be able to 100% discern at that pace, but I think people will be cautioned by content that will have some clear markings on it that this might not be real. That’s one thing that’s going to happen. And I do see to the point of your early, of the whole main dive of the show and California, I do think more laws will come out. I think this will be punishable and I think some people will be made an example of, much like cyber criminals. When they get caught, they’re going to be made an example of hopefully to prevent other criminals from following suit too quickly.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I agree. I think that when I was kind of doing some research in advance of this show, I found that two billion photos are uploaded to the web daily. That’s a lot. So verifying images at scale is a challenge. To your point, there not only will be, but there already are companies working in this space. A couple of them are companies called true TruePic and Serelay. They both offer software development kits to make their technology accessible to third party platforms. These are apps that are used to verify images. So when you think about that, their idea collectively, and these are both very different companies, but their idea is to make their verification technology an industry standard that’s used for digital cameras that includes Facebook or Snapchat or even Apple’s native camera app. So extrapolating that out a little bit, an unaltered image posted on social media would maybe receive a check mark, like a Twitter verification badge, indicating that it matches an image in their database, or that it conveys trustworthiness in that it’s an original unaltered image.
When you think about what’s happening right now in terms of conversation around regulation of these social media platforms and the scrutiny that’s on Facebook and the scrutiny that’s on Google and other big companies, but especially the social media companies, I could really see how it would behoove these social media giants, these tech giants, to embrace this kind of technology, to demonstrate that they are in fact concerned about the veracity of content that’s shared on their sites and that protecting consumers is top of mind for them, and that sort of thing. I think that we’ll start to see this rollout, you say 24 months, I think, again, these kind of things are already on the table. They’re already in development. So I think we’re going to be seeing more and more of them over the course of the next 12 to 24 months for sure.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And to your point, I think it’s pervasive, it’s already out there. It’s scaling, but to the extent of which things become mainstream. I always look at tech and sort of two or three bubbles. There’s the, when we know about it, there’s the, when the more tech savvy, average worker, consumer and kid hears about it. And then there’s when my parents hear about it.
Shelly Kramer: Oh, exactly.
Daniel Newman: There’s these different waves. So a lot of times, and you probably see this, Shelly, there’s things like you and I’ll hear about it and I’ll be talking like, “Oh, did you hear about this new launch, these new Microsoft devices?” And my parents look at me, or I say, “Oh, did you hear about all the new Amazon devices even?” I’ve talked about that a few times and people look at me like, “No. I didn’t hear about a Ring, or a Loop or the earbuds.” I’m like, “Oh, I thought everybody knew about that.”
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, and I haven’t updated my iPhone for the last four years. Why should I?
Daniel Newman: I’m just a dork. Well, that’s actually become a growing question, but that’s for another time in another show.
Shelly Kramer: That is. Well, that wraps up this edition of FTP, the Futurum Tech Podcast today. We want to thank you all for taking time out of your day to hang out with us. If you haven’t yet hit that subscribe button, do, because we’d love to share time with you every week. Daniel, thank you for joining me and we’ll see on the flip side.
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Image Credit: SF Chronicle
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
