Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that...
Yes, Napster is still alive and kicking. The peer-to-peer file-sharing company that became synonymous with music piracy in the early 2000s was bought by a company called Infinite Reality Labs last week for about $207 million. It’s the latest in a string of attempts to revive the brand. After it was shut down by the courts in 2001 and declared bankruptcy, Napster returned as a music subscription service, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens and now a virtual reality-metaverse destination. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Harry McCracken, global technology editor at Fast Company, who has been following Napster from the beginning. He says the brand still has some power.
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China sets its sights on AI leadership
Chinese President Xi Jinping is pushing for the country to be a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030 as Beijing competes with Washington to gain an edge in advanced technology. The release of AI chatbot DeepSeek, which stunned industry experts in January, gave a boost to China’s hopes of catching up to the U.S. despite restrictions on the advanced chips used to power AI.
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Bytes: Week in Review — Trump officials’ Signal leak, 23andMe goes bankrupt and chatbots take on search engines
AI company Anthropic recently added web search to its chatbot Claude. It joins other artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT in delivering one clear answer to a web search query instead of pages and pages of links. Plus, 23andMe declared bankruptcy. So what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data? But first — the Signal group chat heard round the world. A Trump administration official appears to have inadvertently invited a journalist into a conversation about sensitive national security issues on the secure messaging app Signal. The app does offer end-to-end encryption, the gold standard for security in consumer-level messaging apps, but that doesn’t make it foolproof for the most sensitive of data. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to break down all these topics for this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
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Network effect: Customers help utilities build smarter, more efficient power grid
On today’s episode of “Marketplace Tech,” Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Daniel Cohan, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, about virtual power plants. These aren’t physical generating stations. They’re more of a network, usually managed by a local utility, that aggregates electricity from different sources like businesses or homes. Essentially, these customers give energy back to the grid or help the utility balance supply and demand. As electricity demand grows, thanks to power-hungry AI data centers, electric cars and extreme weather, some providers are turning to virtual power plants to reduce strain on the grid.
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The SEC invites cryptocurrency supporters and skeptics to the table
Last Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission held its first-ever crypto roundtable, a discussion with industry leaders and skeptics to answer a grand question: how should the SEC regulate crypto? Should SEC officials regulate crypto tokens like bonds and stocks? The agency under President Donald Trump is taking what many see as a friendlier approach to cryptocurrency and has already dropped a number of lawsuits against various crypto exchanges initiated during the Biden Administration. Axios reporter and author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, Brady Dale, returns to the show to discuss why the question of regulating crypto like a security asset is a very complicated one to answer.
Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that’s constantly changing.
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