Have you ever thought about having a digital twin?

In this episode of Up Next in Tech, I sit down with Jessica Berger, SVP of Innovation at Publicis Media. Admirably known for her insight and understanding of cutting-edge technology, Jessica shares her expertise on trends like web3, AI, extended reality, and gaming. In this conversation, we focused on 4 emerging trends that Jessica's team highlighted in their recent trends report called, Future Forward.

The report included topics like instant content to commerce, immersive digital ecosystems, AI's impact on identity and social life, and the revolutionary implications of gaming's evolution on brands. The episode also sheds light on Jessica's personal definition of innovation and how she nurtures her curiosity, opening up interesting questions around the adoption of virtual try-on technologies and the possibility of using a digital twin.

So if any of these trends interest you, be sure to check out the episode and let me know what you think about virtual try on technologies or any of the trends we mentioned!

In this episode, I sit down with Cathy Hackl to discuss her journey and inspiration from being a journalist to becoming a futurist and the godmother of the metaverse. We explored what brands should keep in mind when building for Generation Alpha - a group of tech natives who are rewiring the future. Cathy also explained the concept of spatial computing and its applications in various industries and how it may evolve over the next few years. We acknowledged the challenges, the need for ethical considerations in how this tech evolves and the potential of spatial computing in creating more immersive and engaging experiences through more integrations of physical and digital worlds and geopolitics in the metaverse.

Throughout our chat, Cathy and I shared personal stories as women and moms in the industry, valuable insights that pave the way for a deeper understanding of the tech landscape, and much more.

In this episode, I had the chance to speak with my good friend, Chris Denson, who is a marketer, innovation coach, multimedia host, and bestselling author of the book- “10 Essential Rules for Breaking Essential Rules”. Conversations around innovation in the creative, advertising or media side often focuses only on the outputs, so we focused this episode on everything else. We lifted the hood on the mindsets it takes, the internal conversations and day-to-day challenges and so much more.

Chris shares insightful stories about how his childhood experiences shaped his curiosity and influenced his current work, and highlighted the importance of maintaining relentless optimism even when things don’t work. We discuss a variety of topics related to innovation, the realities and challenges of bringing ideas to life, the significant role emotional intelligence plays in the field of innovation and so much more.

In this episode, I chat with Nirmala Shome, Head of Marketing and Growth at digital fashion house, The Fabricant– a company that’s focused on building a new fashion industry where everybody participates and profits.

With over 15 years of experience across digital agencies, e-commerce, and immersive startups, Nirmala has honed her expertise as a digital producer, community builder and storytelling marketer for cutting edge technologies.

In our conversation, Nirmala shares her origin journey - from studying digital arts in Australia to taking a leap of faith to New York’s digital agency scene and eventually landing at The Fabricant’s Amsterdam headquarters.

We discuss Fabricant’s vision for the role of digital fashion in gaming, AR, and AI- and how do you balance brand vision with community ownership, and the use of provocative imagery to push diversity and inclusion.

Nirmala also digs into the future of fashion labels and IPs, the difference in work cultures worldwide, the reality of explaining nascent industries while it’s still being built, and her outlook on both the potential opportunities and risks of our increasingly virtual world.

My guest on this episode is Naimul Huq, and at the time we spoke he was the Senior Vice President of Operations at Vayner3, where he helped Fortune 500 companies, startups and organizations navigate emerging tech and web3 strategies. He is now the CEO of Doctor Studios (doctorstudios.co) a digital content studio that helps doctors grow their personal brands, and the EVP of Innovation at a midsized earned marketing agency based in NY.

With over 15 years studying digital culture, marketing analytics and consumer insights, Naimul has become a sought-after translator bridging brands, blockchain and the metaverse.

In this episode, Naimul and I chat about both of our immigrant journeys from Bangladesh, his life growing up in the American Midwest, his career across healthcare innovation and political data science, and his strategic perspective on exponential technologies like AI and VR.

We discuss the risks and opportunities of our data-driven era, using blockchain for transparency not surveillance, and staying open and curious as innovations accelerate.

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Herrity, cofounder of Anima, a gaming and interactive technology company using artificial intelligence to make virtual characters and worlds real. He has spent his career building consumer products that people use every day, including Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, HBO’s streaming apps, and his last startup Ultravisual that was acquired in 2014 by Flipboard.

Alex shares his thoughts on blending physical and digital worlds with care, predictions for mainstream spatial computing and augmented reality, how he nurtures his curiosity which definitely involves his 3 kiddos, and his mission to use emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and extended reality to make previously impossible games and toys.

My guest today is Katherine Zhou, a senior product designer who created the <Design Ethically> toolkit that helps teams forecast the ethical consequences of their products. She also just finished her Master's degree exploring AI Ethics and Society at Cambridge University. She talks about her origin story and the immigrant mindsets that were passed on to her from her parents and how she soon realized that education should be way more than just how to make money after graduation. In this episode, Kat provides thoughtful perspectives on AI and building tech responsibly

How do you know when something is a trend or just hype? What trends should we even pay attention to right now? In this episode I sit down with Webby Award-winning writer Matt Klein, a digital anthropologist and quantitative futurist with a decade of experience in trend forecasting, communications and marketing to dig into these questions. We also go into how he recognized a gap in rigorous cultural analysis and began authoring articles on cultural observations, eventually writing for Forbes and starting his own newsletter.

What are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and how do they work? What exactly does it mean to market “direct-to-community”? In this episode of Up Next In Tech, Ariba Jahan sits down with Simon Yi, co-founder of Myosin.xyz, a marketing DAO where he explained all of this and how he saw the power of DAOs during his time at ConsenSys Ethereum Blockchain Incubator and what inspired him to start a service agency that is a collectively-owned DAO.