The Tech Blog Writer Podcast - Inspired Tech Startup Stories & Interviews With Tech Leaders, Entrepreneurs And Innovators

How secure are your passwords? Have you ever used the same password on more than one website or app? If one of those sites suffers a breach, hackers will attempt to use the exact details on popular websites such as NETFLIX, Amazon. PayPal etc. An average person has 70-80 passwords. A strong password's key aspects are length, a mix of letters (upper and lower case), numbers, and symbols, no ties to your personal information, and no dictionary words. Nobody can remember them all, and it's not safe to write them all down. In today's episode, I explore online security fails and how to avoid them. Gary Orenstein is the CCO of Bitwarden, a password management app that embodies the password security for all mindset. It's the only open-source solution focused on enterprise AND individuals: Source code transparency means it is easy to review, audit, and contribute to the Bitwarden codebase, keeping it secure under the world's watchful eyes. Gary shares tips for businesses to seamlessly transition to using a password m

Did you know that a high percentage of missed school days in emerging markets are due to dental problems caused by poor dental care practices? Or, that 90 percent of global health problems, including COVID-19, would be solved if all of us washed our hands seven times a day?  In this podcast, Thomas Serval, CEO of Baracoda Group, discusses how health issues can be prevented through daily care and wellness practices. His company is creating new smart objects for the bathroom—mirrors, bathmats, toothbrushes, and so on—connected by an open operating system, CareOS. The smart bathroom ecosystem Baracoda and its partners are developing is privacy-first, but the data and insights generated can help people proactively prevent diseases and support better health practices over the long-term.  We talk about Thomas’ 17 years of experience at CES, where Baracoda has consistently introduced award-winning daily healthtech innovations. This year marks the fifth year in a row of garnering CES Innovation Awards. At this year’

Jeroen Corthout, Co-founder at Salesflare, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast. We talk about why people don't use CRMs and how to fix that. We discuss why a CRM is even more critical today with remote selling etc. We also explore the future of CRM and the impacts of data automation, sales automation, AI, and other emerging technologies. I also learn more about the startup story behind the company. For those that don't know, Salesflare is an intelligent CRM that is attractive to startups and small businesses. It's a zero-input sales pipeline tool that thinks and works for its user, not the other way around. No more manual data entry. Salesflare fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the people you're in contact with. Its technology takes data from social media, company databases, phone, email, calendar and hands it to you in automated customer timelines that tell you everything you need to know. You just have to write the emails, make the calls, and have the coffee. Never mi

Kognitiv Spark is a tech company and Microsoft MRPP gold partner recognized for its competency in the secure, reliable, and network agnostic applications of Mixed Reality for remote support. Its flagship product, Remote Spark, is an industrial-grade platform that allows a remote worker to establish a low-bandwidth, secure audio-video call with a subject matter expert when they need help solving a complex problem. The expert, who can be located anywhere in the world, can then see what the remote worker sees and use holographic assets to support the task, all the while keeping the user heads-up and hands-free. RemoteSpark can facilitate the transfer of photos, files (PDFs, Microsoft Office documents), and multi-step animated holograms. IoT data can be tied to holographic assets and represented to remote workers for increased situational awareness. AI can be leveraged for the delivery of task-relevant assets. Ryan Groom is Kognitiv Spark's Co-Founder and CTO. An accomplished software developer and author, Ryan a

COVID-19 forced many industries to rethink their use of technology. This is incredibly true for construction – one of the oldest, largest, and least digitized industries in the world (only slightly ahead of Agriculture in its adoption of tech). Construction cannot simply stop, but when the global pandemic tried to do just that, 2020 became the year that finally forced construction – an industry that remained a holdout – to officially adopt a new approach to getting work done through the use of technology. Procore is a construction management software platform. The company is on a mission to connect everyone in construction on a global platform. It was founded in 2002, and Wyatt Jenkins joined the company earlier this year after leading product Patreon and Shutterstock. I invited him on the podcast to discuss how 2020 became the year that the construction industry went digital and tech's role in transforming the construction industry, and what's ahead for the industry in 2021. I learn how this transformation i

Mark Donnigan builds disruptive innovative startups. Mark's superpower is architecting go-to-market plans and marketing motions that drive real business outcomes for technical and product-centric founders. Mark's growth and market development experience spans 20 years as a transformative B2B marketing and business leader, driving demand, brand development, and strategy for startup and growth-stage companies. Mark joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast to talk about what a go-to-market engineering process looks like and how to leverage category design to build your market. We explore the latest MarTech trends and why demand gen is the responsibility of the entire company, led by marketing. Mark also shares why he feels today's CMO is a business strategist and an ecosystem/domain expert as much as a marketer. He also advises how to act as a Wartime CMO and what behavior differentiates wartime from peacetime.

Alicia Asin Perez is the CEO of Libelium, a Spanish company she founded back in 2006 to monitor and improve the efficiency of everything from agricultural crops and water quality management (for instance helping beluga wales in Alaska) to smartphone detection and smart city management using digital technology. As an example, Libelium's technology is currently being used above the tomb of Tutankhamun to collect climatic data (relative humidity, temperature) and measure fracture aperture behavior above the tomb. The tech is even now being used to monitor water quality for the Scottish Salmon Association! Alicia is extremely focused on using digital technology for environmental and sustainability purposes, hence why her company does so much work in this area. Libelium now has around 150 employees around the world and customers in more than 120 countries. Alicia shares her journey to becoming a tech CEO, balancing family life with two children while building and financing a global tech company with ongoing proje

2020 saw millions of people adapt to remote working across the globe. As a result of the pandemic, businesses including Twitter and Microsoft, to name a few, have committed to long term remote working plans for their employees. However, how do these businesses, who may not have had remote work strategies in place before the pandemic – adapt to this way of working? How do new remote companies continue to hire employees worldwide while remaining fully compliant with individual country laws and regulations? Remote was founded in 2019 by Job Van Der Voort and Marcelo Lebre to simplify how companies employ global talent. Their entire team works remotely in countries around the world. They don’t have any offices because we believe that people do their best work when they are free to work where they choose. Before founding Remote, Job Van Der Voort worked as a neuroscientist and was the VP of Product at GitLab, the world's largest fully remote company. I invited Job to join me in conversation on the Tech Talks Daily

For innovative companies of scale, DailyPay is the leading no-cost, on-demand pay experience platform. It delivers transparent, compliant, and seamless integration with existing payroll systems. Employers who offer DailyPay can reduce costs substantially by out-hiring the market and keeping employees longer, because employees with financial peace of mind are happier, more productive, and have stronger relationships with their employers. The senior management team at DailyPay spent years at AOL, Goldman Sachs, and LendingHome. DailyPay is backed by leading venture capital firms and world-class strategic investors. The Company is headquartered in New York. Since its inception in 2015, DailyPay has partnered with over 250 companies like Kroger, Burger King, Vera Bradley, and Sprinkles Cupcakes to provide employees real-time access to earned pay, with the end goal of empowering Americans to have more control of their earnings to better save, spend and invest. Jason Lee, CEO, and founder, joins me on the Tech Talk

Veryable is a marketplace for on-demand labor for manufacturing and distribution, which provides businesses with higher productivity and fewer administrative burdens and workers with flexible work arrangements. Noah Labhar is a startup founder, CTO, and podcast host. Noah shares his startup story and personal experience building an engineering team of non-CS grads. In a tech startup, how do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin to a fully functioning product? Code Story is a podcast hosted by Noah featuring tech leaders, reflecting the roads they travelled and the products they created. He interviews tech visionaries on his show, digging into the critical moments of what it takes to change an industry and build & lead a team that has your back. Code Story is a window into the digital startup world. In their own words, tech veterans share what it feels like to create a world-class product, how to recover from critical mistakes, and how to scale your solution to the masses. We talk about all this and

Arsen Avakian, founder/former CEO of Argo Tea and current co-founder and CEO of Cooler Screens, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast. Cooler Screens recently announced its largest round of funding yet, backed by Microsoft and Verizon. I learn how Cooler Screens has secured a multi-year collaboration with Microsoft focused on bringing an immersive digital experience to brick-and-mortar retail environments. Through the collaboration, Cooler Screens will work with Microsoft to scale the delivery of its immersive digital media and merchandising platform hosted on Microsoft Azure to retailers and product brands. The companies will also explore additional integration opportunities to deliver enhanced experiences to customers. Cooler Screens is transforming retail cooler surfaces into IoT-enabled screens. Their media platform reimagines the brick-and-mortar shopping experience for consumers in the cooler and freezer aisle while delivering new marketing opportunities and smart merchandising for brands and retaile

Liam Delap, Digital Automation Leader and Director of Enterprise at Pypestream, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast. Liam is a CX automation and Conversational AI evangelist and has served as an enterprise technology consultant and leader throughout most of his career, working with many Fortune 1000 organizations to transform their customer's digital experience. At Pypestream, Liam enables both existing and prospective clients with insight into how to craft their automation journey using Conversational AI for optimal success. His dedication to understand each client's environment and needs allows Liam to design custom solutions that always ensure an outstanding return on investment (ROI). Pypestream is a conversational AI platform that optimizes the customer experience at the enterprise level. Pypestream has been in business for five years. They are venture-backed, with 38M raised and seeing increased success as the pandemic forces large companies to think outside of the call center box when outsourcing

Ads can be complicated. Ajala Digital is on a mission to make them simple. Run by a former Google employee, the company is a certified Google Partner specializing in mobile, search, video, shopping, and display ads. Pamela Wagner is the founder and CEO of Ajala Digital. A company that has worked with more than 2000 companies to grow their businesses through paid ads. In 2017, Pamela was made Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and her insights have been featured on all major media platforms, such as ABC News, Forbes, Yahoo, Mashable, MSN, the Washington Times, Google Startup Grind, and many more. Before founding her company, she worked at Google, and the accomplishment she is most proud of is Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro at 22. I invited her on to the show to talk about how to grow/scale companies through Google Ads & Google Analytics and manage Google Ads (or paid ads in general) effectively in-house.

Many of putting tech geniuses such as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk on a pedestal. Equally, self-imposed limitations and imposter syndrome prevent us from building the next Amazon out of a garage like Jeff Bezos. But how can the average Joe or Joanne be the next Silicon Valley Tech Genius? How did some tech founders create breakthrough products and grow their startups into household names? How did one tech entrepreneur convince an investor in a brief car ride to sign a term sheet for 4 billion dollars? They are tech geniuses—software programmers and startup founders with a magic touch and a special mystique. They capture the imagination of our media, as they turn simple ideas into highly profitable, billion-dollar businesses. But the tech genius is not exactly what you might think. Shawn Livermore tackles this subject head-on in his Amazon Best Selling Business Business Non-Fiction Book called Average Joe: Be the Silicon Valley Tech Genius. Average Joe dispels the myth of the tech genius, explaining how these cleve

Have you eaten and drank too much over the holiday season? Have you already uttered the words, New Year, New Me? In today's episode, I want to explore our relationship with food and the increasing role that technology plays in managing our diet. I invited Tracy Stuckrath onto Tech Talks Daily to discuss the apps and tech solutions that she recommends. We also talk about the food tech scene and community and how more people are turning to technology to manage their health and wellbeing. Tracy shares the tech trends that could help people with dietary requirements, lays to rest a few myths around food allergies and dietary requirements. Tracy Stuckrath is an event planner and international speaker with food allergies based in New Bern, North Carolina. She launched Thrive! Meetings & Events in 2010, changing the trajectory of her event planning career to educate organizations on how to feed attendees with dietary needs. Tracy has co-authored two books — Humans@Work and You@Work, working on her third (Eating

Millions of cryptocurrency users face a challenging problem when it comes to staying compliant with tax laws. Due to the way the digital asset is treated by governments around the world, it is most often subject to capital gains and losses rules similar to stocks, bonds, and other forms of property. This sparks a wide variety of problems for consumers, cryptocurrency exchanges, tax professionals, and other platforms that need to provide both cost basis data and fair market value data to properly report the asset for tax purposes. CryptoTrader.Tax is a platform built to solve this challenge, and with its 2018 partnership with tax giant TurboTax, it is now bringing cryptocurrency tax services to the mainstream. The company is often referred to as The TurboTax for Crypto Investors. David Kemmerer is a veteran in the crypto space and co-founder and CEO of CryptoTrader.Tax, a tax reporting software for Crypto Investors. He joins me on Tech Talks Daily to share the fascinating story of how he got started in Crypto

Quuppa has raised the bar for advanced location systems, delivering the world’s most open, accurate, and reliable location positioning thanks to a unique combination of Bluetooth®, the Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) and Angle-of-Departure (AoD) methodologies, advanced location algorithms, and management software tools that have been developed over the course of more than 15 years. To date, the Quuppa Ecosystem has more than 180 partners around the world who use Quuppa’s open positioning platform to deliver accurate, cost-effective location solutions to companies in a range of industries, including manufacturing and logistics, retail, healthcare, sports, law enforcement, and security, government, asset tracking, and others. Fabio Belloni, CCO, Quuppa, joins me on the podcast to talk about their all-in-one indoor positioning systems that enable unmatched accuracy, safety, and reliability. I learn more about how Quuppa offers highly accurate positioning using a multifaceted, data-driven approach that applies to a seemin

Blockdaemon is a blockchain deployment facilitator. What Heroku does for the cloud, they do for blockchain networks: easy one-click deployment, management, and supervision of nodes, no matter in what configuration. Their solution is fully portable, allowing you to switch networks and chains with the click of a button, so you don't have to worry about picking the perfect network configuration from day one. The company also supports the blockchain developer ecosystem with best-of-breed dev-ops advise. Konstantin Richter, CEO/Founder, Blockdaemon, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast. Konstantin shares his background as a software developer, and how he came to enter the world of crypto/blockchain. We discuss the origins of Blockdaemon and how the company has evolved over the past three years. Other topics up for discussion is the institutional adoption of DLT. The pros and cons of institutions entering the sector and how we can bring institutions into crypto the right way. Finally, why nodes are important sc

Entersekt is an innovator of mobile-first fintech solutions. Financial services providers and other enterprises rely on its patented mobile identity system to provide both security and the best in convenient new digital experiences to their customers, irrespective of the service channel. Dewald Nolte, Chief Strategy Officer at Entersekt, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast. A recent Javelin report found that account takeover fraud is trending at the highest loss rate, up a staggering 72% over the prior year. Initially, AI-driven behavioral biometrics was used primarily to prevent this type of fraud. However, more recently, its application has expanded to identity proofing in light of the massive data breaches and enables risk-based authentication in payment apps. According to Dewald, advances in AI will continue to drive even more capabilities, but its behavioral biometrics isn’t multifactor authentication – it must be combined with a robust digital-certificate-based ID to consumers’ devices. When ther

Infrastructure for personal data access, storage, and portability. Dataswift liberates the value of personal data. Untethering it from central silos and distributing it to individual Personal Data Accounts. Fully owned, fully accessible, fully permissible. Irene Ng, leading data privacy expert and CEO of Dataswift, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast. We discuss big tech's responsibility in protecting data privacy and the importance of the ethical data economy. Irene also shares her controversial opinion about why big tech is actually undervalued and why big tech's problem isn't the monetization of data; it's the lack of transparency. Irene Ng is an entrepreneur, academic and market design economist, Professor of Marketing and Service Systems at WMG, University of Warwick, a Turing Fellow. She is the inventor of personal data accounts (patent pending) for a new asset class of personal data owned by individuals themselves and also the CEO of Dataswift.io. Irene was also previously named one of the 50 wome