Wes Tatters has had a crazy, diverse career history. He is been in IT for around 40 years, and started in the days before the internet. He has had two paths - multimedia and information technology, of which both merged early in his career. He has been writing books since the early days of the internet. But outside of tech, he is married with kids, and in their downtime, they enjoy being together and sharing the world with one another.
Ten years ago, Wes started in on the Wordpress space. He immediately saw that most experiences utilized shared hosting, and he also had customers wanting to build community environments. The problem was most hosting providers didn't perform well enough to support the components needed for these types of sites.
Jennifer Burns is a historian of ideas, focusing on the evolution of economic, political, and social ideas in the United States in the 20th century. She wrote two biographies, one on Milton Friedman, and the other on Ayn Rand.
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Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban 2) Will Apple and Google comply even if the White House doesn't enforce? 3) What does TikTok's behavior tell us about its ties to China's government? 4) How TikTok might stick around 5) Will Elon Musk buy TikTok 6) TikTok CEO Shou Chew is going to sit at the dias during Trump's inauguration 7) Chinese app Little Red Book, or RedNote takes off 8) Does China want Americans on RedNote? 9) DJI removes some restrictions for drones 10) ChatGPT can handle to-dos and set reminders now 11) Are we going to fall in love with AI assistants 12) Why MBAs can't get jobs 13) Is AI going to replace MBAs.
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This episode features a brief check-in with Ochuko Ogra, Chief Transformation and Strategy Officer at Backbone Connectivity Network (BCN), sketching Nigeria's digital infrastructure landscape.
Episode overview:
BCN has over 1,000 km of wholly-owned fibre infrastructure, primarily in the North-Central and North Eastern parts of Nigeria. Citing its stronghold in Northern Nigeria to its expanding national footprint, Ogra shares how BCN is leveraging its two decades of experience in Nigerian telecommunications to drive the country's digital transformation agenda.
Key insights:
- Nigeria currently has 8 subsea cables landing in the country
- The country's 200+ million population presents significant opportunities across retail and enterprise segments in country and to its West African neighbours
- A young, digitally-native population is driving content creation and digital service adoption
- BCN's approach emphasises customer value creation across both enterprise and end-user segments
- The company's strong presence in Northern Nigeria positions it well for national expansion
- Strategic focus encompasses education, healthcare and public sector digitalisation
- Government commitment to digital transformation includes a 92,000km fibre network initiative
- Emphasis on business collaboration over competition in emerging technology integration
Editorial Note: This podcast conversation was recorded at the fringes of NOVACOM Africa 1-to-1 Telco Summit 2024 in Franschhoek, South Africa, where African Tech Roundup's executive producer Andile Masuku attended as an independent media guest. African Tech Roundup maintains complete editorial oversight and is not affiliated with the event organisers.
Image credit: Nova Summits Limited
Courtney Kay-Decker, Deputy Chief Experience Officer at the Internal Revenue Service joins the show to discuss some of the biggest barriers to modernizing the IRS’s digital experience, and how is the organization is working to overcome them. We also talk about how the IRS defines success when it comes to modernizing its digital experiences for citizens and the role personalization plays in the IRS's digital engagement strategy.
Thomas Hansen was born and raised in Denmark. He's also lived in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and then Seattle. He is married to his wife Ingrid, with 3 older kids. His real passion is wind surfing, which he started when he was 14 years old. He even engaged in the support at the semi professional level as a teenager. His favorite spot is in Maui, which includes all the wind surfing options you could want. He also spends an hour in the gym every morning to start the day with endorphins.
Thomas was introduced to his current venture through an early investor in the company. He met with the co-founder, Spenser, and sparks flew. There was a great fit and chemistry between them, and he was invited on board to push the company forward to new heights.
Anand Kulkarni started his career in the dark ages of AI, as a Computer Science researcher at UC Berkeley. He published papers on human intelligence inside of software products, and eventually founded LeadGenius, which was AI for sales and was supported by Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Altman. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, and used to be an avid rock climber. He also loves to eat tofu, and has been picking up a lot more science fiction lately.
Though the AI space is crowded today, Anand and his team have been working in the space since 2016. They observed the need to modernize legacy software and digitally transform organizations. They wanted to utilize an intelligent approach to this, and started down the path of building a large dataset, building software to learn from it, and use that to modernize software.
Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Replika, an AI companion app where people befriend — and sometimes fall in love with — AI bots. Kuyda joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the nature of these relationships, and what they say about our society. In this conversation, Kuyda reveals Replika's ambition for its "phase two," a plan to have AI friends join us in the real world, helping us keep in touch with friends, get off social media, or even watch movies together. Tune in for a fascinating look at the future of human + AI relationships.
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Hannes Lenke was born in East Germany. He started tinkering with computers at an early age, and became interested in making games at the age of 10. Once the browsers came out, he quickly dove into the world of web development. He also has a background in trading stocks, which he started when he was 14, along with software development consulting for enterprise. Outside of tech, he's married with 2 daughters. He lives in a small town close to Berlin, and enjoys running, rowing, and cooking out on his grill.
In 2010, Hannes founded a startup centered around testing. Post exit, he noticed that more and more businesses were using end to end testing... AND, the world was changing toward devops and observability. He decided that a new tool needed to be made along the lines of synthetic monitoring.
