Facebook Messenger, self-drive cars, Smiletime - Weekend listening

We've got 6 new podcasts for your weekend listening pleasure, plus a few classics from the South by Southwest festival. As the saying goes--ICYMI.

Our Tech Roundtable, which we record at the Tunein.com studios here in the heart of Silicon Beach, looks at passwords of the future. Yahoo introduced a new way to log-in this week, via a code sent by text. Sounds great in theory--but what if you can't find your phone? Maybe try Microsoft's new biometric approach to passwords, perhaps? Logging on with your eyes will be a feature of the new Windows 10, coming in the summer.

Our roundtable featured Dave Fink, a partner with incubator Science. Inc., investors Eva Ho (Susa Ventures) and Brian Garrett (Crosscut Ventures) and Alex Krugov, the co-founder of Smiletime, the new app for talking back to your TV. We also weighed in on Facebook's new scheme to pay friends via Messenger and Apple's reported plan to take on cable TV with a new mini-network subscription service aimed at cord cutters

Alex Krugov explains the in and outs of his new Smiletime, which lets viewers interact with cast and crew of such popular TV series as The Flash and Arrow after they air.

Our roundtable panelists Ho, Garrett and Fink talk about what they seek when they take on new tech investments and why they like working with Los Angeles startups.

From the South by Southwest fest--Jon Swartz talks about those robot protests outside the convention center.

 one new app dominated all chatter--Meerkat. Open it up, click a button and you're instantly broadcasting live video to your Twitter followers. Streaming video has never been this easy. After meeting up with analyst Charlene Li at the JW Marriott for a chat about her new book, we saw a bunch of folks in brightly colored yellow T-shirts and it was clear we were in Meerkat land. We grabbed co-founder Ben Rubin for a quick chat.


And here's our final SXSW podcast from earlier in the week, recorded from a booth at the historic Magnolia Cafe South on Congress Avenue. I spoke with USA TODAY photo journalists Sean Fujiwara and Kaveh Rezaei about some of our highlights that day--which included a 3D prosthetic arm and a chat with the Winklevoss brothers about the future of money.