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At CES 2022 Smaller Voices Made Bigger Noise
Photo Credit: Kaare Christian I’m writing in Las Vegas, home to CES, the world’s largest technology and consumer electronics show. Inconveniently, even in a normal year, it always takes place during the first week of January. (I’m something of an expert as CTA (parent of CES) acquired my company in 2019 and I still serve as a consultant to, and am a huge fan of theirs. This year, because of the Omicron spike, CES happened in a decidedly smaller, more subdued fashion.
Process Transformation: The bridge to the modern enterprise, digital experiences
We’re living in an age of experience, extreme consumerization, and very rapid change. Just keeping up is a major challenge for companies. What is good today may not be relevant tomorrow, and a new service or product line today could be cannibalized by something much better depending on what comes next. But brands must do more than just keep up. They must rethink how they operate to better anticipate consumer needs.
HO, HO, HO, WTF!
It’s beginning to look a lot like a remote Christmas. Yes, ‘tis the season to be jolly (if possible) and work from home yet again. For the loved ones in your life, trapped in their screens, here’s our last-minute gift list, created by the editors of the Virtual Events Group (which I founded amidst the pandemic). Lumecube Cordless Ring Light Perfect for live-streaming, it includes adjustable color temperature, adjustable brightness, and a cordless battery-powered option.
Navigating Platforms and Technologies for a New Healthcare Era
Here’s what payers and providers should look for as they update their core platform strategies for the new normal in healthcare. As discussed in our previous article, many healthcare organizations we work with have set their sights on delivering holistic, frictionless customer journeys that span the boundaries between payers and providers and seamlessly blend physical and digital experiences.
Art Basel Meets the NFT Cool Kids
If life imitates art (Oscar Wilde) then NFTs imitate both art and life. NFTs, if you haven’t heard, are digital things — art, music, video, and even, sometimes, physical things, that you can purchase, collect, own and display. Your proof of ownership is stored on a blockchain and you can trade or sell whenever you can find somebody else to buy it. But the NFT craze, which along with its crypto parent has created much new wealth, is decisively blending with the traditional worlds of wealth.
As Medical Science Accelerates, Remote Clinical Trials Will Triumph
Clinical trials, a crucial phase of drug development, continue to evolve as new technologies allow researchers to manage them without participants coming to a physical location. Historically, they had to go somewhere to get medications and report results. Now reporting is done online and drugs are delivered by mail, in what are called decentralized trials (DCTs). The trend began before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has significantly increased drug companies’ need to use this approach.
Like Taking Candy from Babies: Grownups in the Metaverse
Image credit: Patricia Prudente This summer, my colleague David Kleeman explained how kids kickstarted the metaverse. The habits and practices that go along with metaversal life are already spawning a mosh pit of ideas about digital ownership, like a recognition of the value of digital accessories as well as, of course, in-game currencies. Now we’re seeing strange phenomena.
Arevo and Our 3D-Printed Future
Unibody 3D-printed carbon fiber bicycle "Superstrata" manufactured by Arevo. Sonny Vu is used to making big ideas become realities. We met in 2012 when he was launching the MisFit (the name tipped its hat to Apple’s “Think Different” ads back then). It was a simple step-counting/sleep-tracking wearable as elegant and beautiful as it was inexpensive and functional. The company was acquired by Fossil Group for $260 million in 2015.
Piloting Big Technologies On a Tiny Scottish Island
Ferries tied up in Kirkwall (Credit: Community Energy Scotland) The Orkney Islands, just above mainland Scotland, may seem like the end of the earth, but hydrogen power projects launched there could help usher in a new era for marine transportation. A consortium of government, business, and community organizations is developing programs to test hydrogen as fuel for a ferry that runs between the Orkney mainland and the tiny island of Shapinsay.
Young People Are Watching, and They’re Pissed Off
Protests in Glasgow, Scotland during COP26. Image credit: Steve Hamm GLASGOW, Scotland – The host city for the UN’s COP26 climate conference was on fire last week—metaphorically speaking. After the wakeup call from COVID-19, the pressure was on to finally do something decisive about global warming, and the city was bursting with energy, ideas, and great expectations.
Water & Climate: Wicked Problem Meets Threat Multiplier
Water and climate change are wicked problems, independently and jointly. In a 1973 article in Policy Sciences, Horst W. J. Rittel and Marvin M. Webber introduced the idea of a “wicked problem,” a social policy dilemma that has no definitive scientific solution and is intertwined with other problems. Where the two wicked problems of water and climate change overlap, climate change is a threat multiplier.
Glasgow Dispatch: Startup Funding Encourages Sustainability
S'wheat Ritchie and Elliott-Hooks (Credit: S'wheat) Glasgow – The first week of the UN’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, has been packed with news and announcements from within the official venue and from the streets of Scotland’s second city. But on the symbolic level, it’s possible that no event was more important than the Net Zero EDGE startup contest that took place here today.
Blood Test Shows Promise for Detecting Cancer Far Earlier
For people with cancer, early detection can mean the difference between life and death. Detecting cancer in its earliest stages — before it has grown aggressively or spread to lymph nodes or other parts of the body — gives people the best chance of survival. The more advanced the cancer when it’s diagnosed, the lower the odds it can be conquered with surgery or therapies.
How Oil-Rich Aberdeen is Pivoting Away from Fossil Fuels
Aberdeen harbor (Credit: Creative Commons Alan Jamieson) In the middle of the 20th century, Aberdeen was one of Great Britain’s economic basket cases. But the fortunes of this city of 200,000 in northeast Scotland swung wildly after the discovery of North Sea oil in the late 1960s. The city’s economy boomed. Now the city and its region are pivoting to build a new economy that is not so dependent on oil. City leaders have a new aspiration: to be a renewable energy capital.
Lilliputians Will Tie up Gulliver in the Coming Metaverse
Zuckerberg selects his virtual outfit in the Meta announcement video. Audacious. That is the only word to explain Mark Zuckerberg’s play to become the self-anointed king of the metaverse. This week Facebook announced the formation of a new parent company, Meta, and a full-steam-ahead approach to so-called Web 3.0. He seems to want to create a next-gen, distributed and ubiquitously immersive online world, where you will not just passively view the web experience, but will enter and interact with it.
Facebook, the Imperialist Media Company
The enormous set of unseemly revelations known as the Facebook Papers show, among other things, that Facebook is a global media company that does not bear its associated responsibilities. (A full list is here of the now well over 100 articles in over a score of outlets.) A media company selects programming and presents it to viewers. Just about every one of the Facebook Papers stories is about how the company makes decisions about what content to show and to whom.
COP26: Let’s Pivot to Save the Planet
Climate activist Greta Thunberg. Credit: Anders Hellberg Note: This is the first in a COP26 series from climate journalist Hamm, who will be in Glasgow. Next week, thousands of people will gather from around the globe for the United Nations’ two-week COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
Scientists ID Genetic Risk Factors For Suicide
Suicide is a global epidemic, taking nearly 800,000 lives each year. And in the U.S., where suicide rates rose by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019, getting support and resources to the right people at the right time is a pressing need. The problem is so critical that large groups of scientists around the world have banded together to study it.
Corporate Purpose Engages Employees, and Tech Can Help
With employers struggling to fill more than 10 million jobs currently in the U.S. alone and rising rates of employee burnout, it’s imperative now more than ever for organizations to keep their workforces engaged and connected to their company’s purpose. More than ever, employees are reflecting on their quality of life and often deciding not to return to the workforce.
A Glimpse Into Future Investing
Image credit: Mathieu Stern This piece originally appeared in FIN, James Ledbetter’s fintech newsletter. For centuries, the relationship between individuals and investment has been almost entirely siloed. There is you, and there is your banker, and there is a lot of legal and structural scaffolding to make sure that no one gets in between that relationship.
Take Me to Space.
William Shatner tells Jeff Bezos about his spaceflight experience in a screenshot from Blue Origin's livestream. I’ve made a decision. I’m not saving for retirement. I’m saving for a trip to space. I need to see our blue marble from above. I want to live the Star Trek dream – to go where no one has gone before. When I first started telling people about my plan to save up for a ticket to space in lieu of retirement, I thought it was cute.
The Name Facebook Needs to Change: Zuckerberg
Can you imagine any normal company keeping its CEO if it faced, like Facebook does, an endless litany of criticism for failures, mistakes, errors, harms, omissions, distortions, outright lies, deceptions, and delusions? A normal company would not. A normal company would replace its leadership. Facebook, of course, cannot. Facebook, of course, has no governance. Facebook is a dictatorship of one man, who controls 58% of the company’s voting shares. Yet his judgment appears worse with every passing day.
The Stuff Shortage is a First World Problem
West Chester, PA, USA - May 18, 2021: Shortage of pet food results in empty store shelves at the grocery store. File this under TMI (too much information): I have a colonoscopy scheduled, and at the moment New York City seems to be completely out of bowel prep liquid. The shortage is expected to continue through spring. OK, I understood the earlier toilet paper and grocery shortage, but this one has me scratching my head about the precarious state of our society’s supply chain for goods.
Rejuvenating Leisure Travel with a More Holistic Experience
Hit hard by COVID-19, the travel and hospitality (T&H) industry rebounded from its deep 2020 trough earlier this year, with both hoteliers and airlines showing significant momentum in revenues and demand over last year’s disastrous levels. However, that leaves industry room revenues and travel demand well below 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.
New Taxes Could Help Manage Big Tech
Historically technology has undone the economic power it creates. IBM is a good example, still here, but living off its past and fumbling the future. Yet for the current generation of tech giants, this time may be different. It is hard to see what displaces the huge installed base that exists today for these companies. Artificial intelligence, mirror worlds, quantum computing——these will all play an important part in our future, but I am not sure they create a discontinuity.
Instagram for Kids: Doomed from the Start
Under intense scrutiny from lawmakers and childrens’ advocates, Facebook has, once again, reluctantly pivoted to a promise that it will listen first and act only after that. This week the company, which owns Instagram, paused its controversial efforts to build an “Instagram for Kids” that would allow kids under 13 years of age to share photos and comments with each other providing they had parental permissions.
Genetic Tests Won’t Predict Your COVID-19 Risk
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko Years from now, our current age of genetic testing will be remembered as one of innovation and excitement — as well as a time when a host of misleading claims about genetic tools were targeted at consumers. Unfortunately, that last trend applies to pandemic-related marketing too. This story begins, like so many other COVID-19 stories, on social media.
Robin’s Rules of Order: New Models for the Workplace
Now that we’ve bitten into the forbidden fruit of the work-from-home apple we have, as the biblical tale goes, seen each other naked. And once you’ve seen the makeupless faces, the shoddy t-shirts, the adorable/annoying pets and kids, and that big reveal–the inside of a co-workers home–there’s no going back. Plucking people out of their natural habitat, gussying them up, and sticking them in a context-less office chair seems downright abnormal.
Vision Performance Ripe for Innovation & Investment
NFL Cleveland Browns Wide Receiver, Jarvis Landry, wearing Senaptec Strobes. Image courtesy of Senaptec. Steph Curry is one of the NBA’s best 3-point shooters, and according to Bleacher Report, that is due in part to his vision performance training with strobe glasses, which are eyewear devices that produce specific visual conditions by alternating between transparent and opaque lighting.
Outlaw? Pariah? Renegade Empire? Digesting the WSJ Series About Facebook
The Wall Street Journal this week began publishing an extraordinary series of damning articles about Facebook. The five so far consistently hit one theme–that the company is often very well informed about harms its systems cause society, but nonetheless chooses either not to take action or to lie in public about what it knows, or both.
How the Pandemic Set the Future of Food and e-commerce in Motion
The pandemic changed many consumer habits. Few were impacted as much as eating and shopping. Before COVID shut down restaurants and prompted grocery store raids, apps had already simplified food delivery. Meal kits were becoming a more frequent part of weekly rotations in kitchens across the world and grocery delivery had moved from fringe to, well, less fringe. These were for most a splurge every so often. A way to incorporate a little convenience after a long day at the office. A luxury.
Spiritual Opium: China Limits Kids' Online Gaming Time
It’s been said that to really understand China you need to understand the Opium Wars. China lost face and power as the British and other foreigners sought unfettered access to its trade goods. Somehow it’s fitting that this week Chinese party officials unveiled tough new limits on the amount of time its young people can spend playing online games.
Zoom Wants to Be the Center of Your Universe. What Could Go Wrong?
On August 24th Zoom experienced a significant worldwide outage. The Washington Post reports that it’s unclear how many people were affected. Information points to some sort of “authentication” problem. The initial problem was reported on DownDetector, a site that tracks outages on major platforms, apps, and devices. Zoom now reports 300 million daily participants so a little authorization trouble goes a long way.
Fuzzy Logic Makes AI More Explainable
Despite its growth and popularity, AI is not as widely adopted as it could be—particularly by small- and mid-size businesses that lack the enormous data sets of business and tech giants. One reason is that AI designers are not doing enough to consider the end user. Consider the many stages an AI solution must pass through in order to be successfully integrated into a company’s workflow. An algorithm begins with an AI expert who must incorporate knowledge from a subject matter expert.
The Third Dose: What You Need to Know
Even as confusion about third vaccine doses deepened, recent actions by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention increased the likelihood that such booster shots will be inevitable for Americans trying to protect themselves against COVID-19. But questions abound. Has the third dose decision been finalized?
Best One in the Zoom: A Practical Guide
Techonomy and Worth recently hosted a private workshop for members with renowned journalist and coach Jane Hanson. Hanson is an Emmy-award-winning journalist who for over 30 years has worked with leaders to enhance their public presence and ensure they resonate with audiences. The workshop, called “How to Be the Best Communicator in the Room…and on the Screen” gave members feedback on their biggest challenges in presenting, speaking, and running meetings virtually.
Can Insurtech Rise to the Challenge and Meet the Post-Pandemic Moment?
Lara Dulaney remembers – a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – an era when “I had to wait for my bank statements to come” via snail mail. Today, the Senior VP of Finance and HR at Music Audience Exchange (MAX), the tech company that powers brand and music partnerships, is not only a long-time user of digital banking and human resources platforms, but an early convert to insurtech, the intersection of insurance and technology.
Can We Make Fashion Truly Sustainable?
Image courtesy of Depop With the climate crisis upon us, now more than ever, it’s time to reevaluate our daily lives and focus on the impact we have on our planet. Working to lessen our environmental footprint won’t be simple, cheap, or fast. To illustrate that, I thought I’d look at fashion and attire. As a teenager, it’s something my peers and I spend plenty of time thinking about.
Niantic Calls the Current Metaverse Dystopian
Ariana Grande in Fortnite You can tell a metaverse newbie when they walk into a room, especially a digital one. And it’s often me. Last week I attended a meeting in MootUp, a fabulous 3D immersive environment that requires no additional hardware (like a headset) and runs on all devices. While I loved the novelty of it, here’s the thing. First, I had to dress for the meeting.
How Do We React to the Climate Tragedy?
If you weren’t shaken up by the news this week about the UN climate report, it probably means you didn’t hear the news. While some reported the data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a mix of bad and good news, I found it unadulteratedly bad. The world is fated to warm dramatically more, no matter what we do from now on in reducing emissions of global warming gasses, the report said.
Can We Rescue Anti-Vax Victims?
In the end, I think it was the news about people getting vaccinated in disguise that broke me. A doctor in Missouri, where anti-vax sentiment runs high, said people who wanted to get the COVID-19 vaccine were so afraid of how their friends and neighbors would react that they had begun showing up in disguise to get their shots.
The US Senate’s Sneaky Crypto Move
This piece originally appeared in FIN, James Ledbetter’s fintech newsletter. If you find it strange that the infrastructure bill snaking its way through Capitol Hill might fundamentally change the way that cryptocurrency transactions take place in the United States, you’re not alone. Late this week a flurry of news stories and activist campaigns flagged a relatively obscure provision in the infrastructure bill that mentions cryptocurrency.
Summer 2021: Are We Going Up or Down?
We’re creeping back, and the other day I was getting in the elevator at Techonomy’s 15th floor office on 5th Avenue when I encountered a confused-looking woman. “Going down?” I asked her. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m stopping at every floor to help me remember which one I work on.” That, for me, nicely encapsulates this strange moment. Are we going up or down? It’s been so long since we did what we used to do, we can’t even remember what it was, or how to resume.
Is Hiring Teenage Influencers to Promote Vaccines A Good Idea?
The New York Times recently wrote about the White House’s tactic to promote Covid-19 vaccinations using an “army of influencers”. The article confirmed what I had been seeing on social media recently, though what I saw took the form of memes and jokes surrounding 18-year-old singer Olivia Rodrigo’s visit to the White House. My initial reaction was positive and hopeful; I thought using the rising pop star was a great move by the Biden Administration.
The Shrink in Your Pocket Will See You Now
For the longest time I believed that giving a person suffering from mental health issues an app was like giving a junkie a syringe. (Make that two syringes if the sufferer’s issues involve Internet addiction.) But the pandemic has upped the urgency to access mental help professionals and digital therapeutics without leaving home, affordably. Perhaps I judged these “self help” and telehealth apps that promise a happier, more mindful life too hastily.
What the Moon and the Metaverse Have in Common
Lewis and Clark, Ernest Shackelton, Roald Amundsen — they just couldn’t sit still and not dream of uninhabited places. George Mallory, a climber who lost his life on Everest, has earlier been asked why he climbed it. He answered, “because it is there”. (That’s often wrongly attributed to Sir Edmund Hilary.) Today we can see the distant edges of two new territories ripe for new kinds of exploration–one physical, one virtual. One is in outer space, the other in digital space.
Gen Z: Get Off Tik Tok and into the Streets
More and more teenagers all over the world are joining the movement to combat climate change online. The Covid summer of 2020 helped inspire thousands of Gen-Zers to get more active on the topic on social media. Renowned teen activist Greta Thunberg has 11.9 million followers on Instagram, where the hashtag #Climatechange has 5.6 million posts. That same hashtag on TikTok has 825.7 million views, and #climatecrisis has 106 million views there.
Neither Honor System nor Vaccine Passports – We Need a Third Way - Techonomy
When the CDC updated its guidance in May to allow vaccinated people to discard their masks in most situations, many Americans expressed cautious optimism about the trajectory of the pandemic. But then earlier this month, the WHO issued different advice, urging everyone—regardless of vaccination status—to wear a mask as a barrier against the new Delta variant. And just yesterday, the CDC again revised its stance, recommending that Americans mask-up when indoors in COVID hot-spots.
Women’s Problems: Can FemTech Offer Relief?
Image courtesy of Clue Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, who writes regularly about the health care ecosystem on her site, Health Populi, has been focused on the “She-cession”–how women who have left the workforce in record numbers during the pandemic have been impacted economically. Unlike in the 2008 crisis, she says, when men bore the economic brunt of the downturn, this one particularly affected women, who were more likely to work out of the home and often unable to work remotely.
Stablecoin Regulation Is Coming Soon. But What Will It Look Like? (Part I)
This piece originally appeared in FIN, James Ledbetter’s fintech newsletter. It seems abundantly clear that stricter US regulation of stablecoins is imminent. This week, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell testified before House and Senate committees, and there were moments when he seemed almost vexed by stablecoins. On Wednesday, Powell told a House committee: We have a tradition in this country where the public’s money is held in what is supposed to be a very safe asset.
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