Innovation19 with Daniel Anstandig

In the final installment of the three-part series on Robots, Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig wonders if robots can, or ever will, have a soul. As robotics continues to advance, this is a tricky question that has caused science and spirituality to converge in unprecedented ways. What exactly is a soul? Where does it reside in our bodies? And if we don’t know, how can we bestow it onto something we create? Perhaps putting our own souls into robots is the closest we’ll get: Anti-aging is a huge...

On the second part of this three-part series on Robots, Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig looks at the bodies artificial intelligence are inhabiting. While most of our sci-fi assumes that robots will be built to look human, in real life, they’re anything but. The most ubiquitous robots are service bots built for e-commerce – like the over 200,000 robots Amazon has working in their warehouses – or cleaning, like Roombas. No one would say they look anything like people, but they get the job done; so...

In this three-part series, Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig dives deep into robots. The more innovative we get with robotics, the more we’re faced with existential questions. Are robots on a course to becoming indistinguishable from humans, like in the sci-fi drama Westworld? And if so, then what makes humanity unique? For the first part, Daniel looks at the mind in the machine. So far, artificial intelligence operates a lot like a better brain, capable of problem-solving, spotting patterns, and...

Technologist, connector, and entrepreneur Mariana Acuña-Acosta was a pioneer in her hometown of Mexico City, where she founded the first VR and 360-video-production-and-branding agency, Jolt VR. But about five years ago, she tells Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig, she saw the potential of virtual film production (like what we see in Avatar or The Mandalorian) and realized there was an opportunity to democratize the technology that makes virtual production possible. So she founded Glassbox...

Employment law, human relations, harassment, and diversity training: These things might not be sexy, but they are extremely important to running a successful business – particularly if you employ people in multiple states. On this episode of Innovation19, Daniel Anstandig gets a detailed breakdown from Cherie Silberman, employment law attorney and founder of Empath Employment & HR Law, about why understanding employment law is essential for businesses to not only avoid the courtroom, but to...

Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig is a huge fan of virtual reality; in fact, he’s ready for the full, immersive, Oasis-like experience from the film Ready Player One. Fortunately, it’s not as far away in the future than we might think! On this episode of Innovation19, Daniel sits down with Joanna Popper, the global head of virtual reality for location-based entertainment at HP. She’s spent most of her career in entertainment and branding, creating award-winning content and always seeing the latest...

With Valentine’s Day coming up, it’s a great time to talk about the big business of love and romance, which generates billions of dollars in revenue every year in the U.S. So on this episode of Innovation19, Daniel Anstandig dives into the multi-billion dollar dating industry. Even if your company isn’t centered around finding other people’s soulmates, any business can learn a lot from dating apps – especially how to dominate a crowded market through small but significant differentiations...

What if the future of websites looked like a game, where you could interact with objects as if you were in a real space? What if aliens aren’t from space, but from other dimensions? How can you measure human consciousness? Daniel Anstandig sits down with futurist Zenka Caro to answer all these questions and more, getting into the potential of wearable tech and augmented reality, her passion-based economy and citizen science projects, the importance of conscious capitalism, why she wants to...

The first-ever virtual CES is in the books, and while this year felt more about evolutions of existing technologies and products than launching major, industry-changing new ones, there's still a lot broadcast media can take away from the event. On this episode of #Innovation19, Daniel breaks down CES 2021 trends related to audience engagement, content, and revenue for broadcast media, capped off with a lightning round of the fun gears and gadgets that always come out of CES (ultra-premium...

Dr. Louis Profeta is not only an emergency physician at St. Vincent Hospital, he’s also a renowned lecturer and author; his critically-acclaimed book The Patient in Room Nine Says He’s God, as well as his many articles tackling drug and alcohol abuse in teens, have made him one of the most widely-read opinion writers out there. On this episode of Innovation19, Daniel Anstandig sits down with Dr. Profeta to hear about what it’s like being on the frontlines of Covid-19, the future of...

Have you made a resolution to be more productive in the new year? Productivity is important, of course — we all want to reach our goals in a reasonable amount of time, after all! But as Daniel Anstandig points out in this episode of Innovation19, we often judge our productivity by the amount of tasks we complete in a day, regardless of the importance of those tasks. It can lead us to create ridiculously long to-do lists we have no hope of completing in a single day, leaving us feeling like a...

So many of us have been working from home since the beginning of the pandemic that it’s hard to imagine commuting to an office again. Besides saving us an average of $13,000 a year on transportation costs, research has shown that workers get more accomplished in a shorter period of time when we work from home. On the other hand, when employees are together in person, it fosters a greater sense of community and a stronger company culture than constant Zoom meetings ever could, which has an...

On this episode of Innovation19, Daniel takes a look at what Hollywood has predicted about our future over the decades to discover what they got right, what they got wrong, and what they actually helped make happen. Jetpacks and flying cars, holograms and hoverboards, gesture-based technology and targeted advertisements, neural links and brain interfaces, universal translators and food printers, AI and robots, and memory deletion or replacement were all big parts of some of our favorite...

Daniel spends this episode of Innovation19 with professor and author Rita McGrath, a true expert in leading innovation and growth and developing winning leadership strategies for companies of any size to thrive no matter what. This powerhouse conversation includes insights about her “continuous reconfiguration” mindset that enables leaders to always be ready for change, able to shed old business models, strategies, or practices that aren’t working anymore for new ones that will. They also...

Daniel Anstandig breaks down the state of broadcast ad sales in 2021 on this episode of Innovation19. He’s joined by Tracy Gilliam, the veteran broadcast executive who founded Futuri’s TopLine sales system because she knew that “every station has a story.” Each ad client is trying to reach a specific type of consumer, and while radio and television stations could rely on gross audience numbers to sell their reach in the past, it’s a little more complicated now. Brands understand that a...

Daniel Anstandig breaks down the state of broadcast ad sales in 2021 on this episode of Innovation19. He’s joined by Tracy Gilliam, the veteran broadcast executive who founded Futuri’s TopLine sales system because she knew that “every station has a story.” Each ad client is trying to reach a specific type of consumer, and while radio and television stations could rely on gross audience numbers to sell their reach in the past, it’s a little more complicated now. Brands understand that a...

Targeted ads and media content are convenient for users and efficient for businesses, but films like Netflix’s The Social Dilemma have raised serious questions about what they're doing to us culturally. The film argues that targeting contributes to an epidemic of division in our society, allowing everyone to live in an echo chamber of their own opinions, stifling empathy and growth. But in this episode, Daniel explains that there are plenty of benefits to targeted content; if we’re more...

Wearable tech is so commonplace now that we barely notice how our phones keep up with our heart rate, our sleep patterns, our food intake and more. But implanted neurotechnology might have even more benefits. On this episode, Daniel sits down with Taryn Southern, a VR and technology expert and the first person to create a solo pop album by collaborating with an AI program. She explains the benefits of neurotech in health and medicine – such as ameliorating the side effects of diseases,...

Thanks to social media, it’s nearly impossible to be the first news outlet to break a big story these days; when celebrities like Patton Oswalt can tweet about an earthquake while it’s happening, or a local can upload a video of a tsunami, how can a more traditional newsroom keep up? In this episode, Daniel explains why news media outlets should be turning to AI systems, like Futuri’s TopicPulse, to analyze trends and predict what stories will resonate most with which demographics. This...

The hugely popular Disney+ original Star Wars series, 'The Mandalorian', uses an innovative technology called StageCraft to produce its episodes with an on-location feel, while saving millions in production costs. Plus, their production method enabled them to complete and release a brand-new season of television in the middle of a pandemic. In this “unapologetically nerdy” episode, Daniel explains these innovations and how they work, why it’s important to note that the show uses practical...