10 tech podcasts you should listen to now

Don’t ever say there’s nothing good on.

There’s a whole lot of podcasts about technology. The New & Noteworthy collection of tech podcasts on iTunes holds 2,000 of them. And some really are worth your attention.

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Podcasts first popped up nearly a decade ago, following the ascent of Apple’s iPod. In the past year or so, though, it feels like there’s been a renaissance for the form, especially with the growth of Serial, WBEZ’s offshoot of radio show This American Life. But Serial doesn’t cover technology.

Here are 10 tech podcasts that are worth following in this “golden age.”

1) Talking Machines

Former radio journalist Katherine Gorman has teamed up with Ryan Adams, a Harvard professor teaching classes on machine learning, to do a twice-monthly podcast on that very topic. Talking Machines is still pretty new, but it’s already landed interviews with prominent figures in machine learning, including Facebook’s Yann LeCun and Google’s Ilya Sutskever.

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2) Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z podcast

One of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms happens to make one of the most compelling tech podcasts. Partner Benedict Evans regularly provides great analysis of mobile apps and operating systems, and chief executives of Andreessen Horowitz companies, like Mesosphere’s Florian Leibert, talk about what they’re seeing out there in the world. And the sound is always crystal-clear — just what you would expect from an operation like Andreessen Horowitz.

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3) Product Hunt Radio

In this weekly podcast from Product Hunt, that growing San Francisco startup maintaining a daily list of products that launch, founder and chief executive Ryan Hoover speaks with founders, venture capitalists, tech journalists, and product people.

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4) Partially Derivative

This weekly podcast is an excuse for Chris Albon and Jonathan Morgan, two data scientists working at nonprofit tech company Ushahidi, to drink beer and talk about data science. They make it easy for laypeople to get excited about algorithms, often by discussing real-world examples.

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5) The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast

It’s always great when Ben Lorica, O’Reilly Media’s chief data scientist, comes through with another installment of his podcast. It’s about big data, and it’s nerdy, and it’s great. Previous guests include Apache Kafka guru Jay Kreps and graph analytics expert Carlos Guestrin.

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6) The Wired.co.uk podcast

The journalists working at the United Kingdom branch of Wired consistently turn out witty and interesting conversations. Oftentimes they skip the most prominent tech topics of the day and instead talk at length about offbeat and really interesting subjects. And they all have such great accents.

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7) Hello World

Shawn Wildermuth is a Microsoft-centric programmer who works at Atlanta software-development company WilderMinds. Every month or so, Wildermuth turns out a new episode of Hello World, which is basically a long and winding conversation with an experienced developer.

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8) Stacey Higginbotham’s Internet of Things podcast

Stacey Higginbotham has outfitted her house with a whole bunch of Internet-connected devices. She wrote about the Internet of Things (IoT) in articles and talked about it on podcasts at Gigaom, until it abruptly closed last month. Now Higginbotham has started her own new IoT podcast, and it’s off to a great start.

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9) Exponent

Each week, this podcast delivers a thoughtful conversation between Ben Thompson, founder of the tech blog Stratechery, and James Allworth, a coauthor (along with Clayton M. Christensen and Karen Dillon) of the best-selling business book How Will You Measure Your Life? I can feel myself getting smarter as I listen to this one.

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10) What to Think — VentureBeat’s podcast!

There’s no way I’m leaving What to Think off the list. Each week my colleagues and I talk about the biggest stories appearing on VentureBeat, and we interview people like Tim Draper, Walter Isaacson, and John McAfee.

 

I realize I’m leaving out some very good tech podcasts. Go ahead and talk about your favorites in the comments.