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WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

News, Tech News

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Would you ditch your smartphone for a more minimalist one? That's the radical idea behind Light, a company founded on the belief that our constant fight for attention has turned smartphones into an addiction. At WSJ Tech Live, senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern sat down with Light CEO Kaiwei Tang, along with vocal product fan, actor and producer Aaron Paul. Plus, as you prepare for holiday travel, we'll look at the flight tracking app that notifies fliers about delays and cancellations well before the airlines do. Our Science of Success columnist Ben Cohen tells us how Flighty works. Julie Chang hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, November 25th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal.
0:10.2	As you prepare for holiday travels, there's a flight tracking app that's managing to notify flyers
0:16.0	about delays and cancellations well before the airlines themselves. We'll take a look at how it all works.
0:23.2	Plus, is it time to roll back the clock on smartphones? After Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad Fame,
0:29.3	seems to think so. He recently joined a WSJ Tech Live panel on Minimalist Tech. We'll hear part of that
0:35.8	conversation later in the show.
0:46.8	But first, flight tracking app, FlightE, somehow regularly manages to beat airlines when it comes to alerting passengers for flight delays and cancellations. The secret to this seemingly
0:51.8	impossible feat? Data. That's according to our Science of Success
0:56.2	columnist, Ben Cohen, who has been relying on the app for his own travels and joins me now to
1:01.2	explain how it works. So Ben, tell us about Flighty and how it came about.
1:05.9	Flighty is the world's most popular flight tracking app. It is an app that is a live flight tracker, but also
1:13.1	does a whole lot more than that. It gives you delay updates, cancellation alerts, and tells
1:18.3	you basically everything that you could possibly want to know about any flight that you might
1:23.2	take. And amazingly, it actually came about during a flight delay. Ryan Jones, the founder of
1:30.1	flighty, was stuck in an airport Chili's in Fort Lauderdale on New Year's Day in 2018. He was there
1:37.1	for four hours when he decided that enough was enough and he was going to build exactly the product
1:41.9	that would have allowed him to avoid the mess that he was in.
1:45.8	And so ever since 2018, he has been building out flighty, and every time there is chaos in the skies,
1:53.2	they get a surge in downloads.
1:55.5	And so the past two weeks after the FAA mandated a reduction in air traffic across America, a lot of people
2:02.6	turned to flighty to find out exactly what was happening with their flight and how they might be
2:07.2	able to navigate themselves to avoid chaos and make traveling just a little bit less miserable.
	...

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