What's Emerging December 2020
A newsletter on interesting stuff that is emerging around the world so you can think about strategy
Introduction
Welcome to our last newsletter for the year.
We will be back with our first newsletter for 2021 at the end of January. Here’s hoping 2020 will be a whole lot better than 2020
In the next few weeks, as usual we generally slow down for the summer as boards and senior executive teams are generally not keen on starting any major foresight projects when some people will be away part of the time over the next 8 weeks. Therefore the concentration will be on reading and writing, and building a new consultation model for next year. Paul will continue to work on the project looking at the industrialisation of robots and building a consortium model to new organisational approaches in the not for profit sector. He will also start planning for strategy engagements with two councils for February.
If you want to talk about the use of foresight in your strategy for 2021 then please Contact Us. We can make a start on planning in December or we can book a slot for the work in the new year.
We hope that you all have a great Christmas and new year holiday season. Stay safe out there and we look forward to interacting with you again next year.
The Emergent Futures Team
In case you missed it. The most popular link from the last edition:
Jeff Bezos: Here’s how I make Amazon’s highest-stakes decisions
In an excerpt from a new collection of his writings, Amazon’s CEO says that his secret is making fewer, better decisions—and thinking three years out.…….Read more
What are we Writing About?
Paul has written a piece on the relationship between foresight, forecasting, and resilience which is part of our new flagship strategy approach for next year You can go to our HOME PAGE and look under our latest work to read it.
What’s Emerging?
SellerX raises $118M to buy up and grow Amazon marketplace businesses
SellerX — a new outfit in Berlin — has closed a round of $118 million (€100 million) that it plans to use to roll up smaller enterprises that use Fullfilment by Amazon for payments, logistics and delivery for their products. Paul: As Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics (and others) have said - “ there are only two business models, bundling and unbundling”. Here is a classic case of bundling.…. Read More
AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
This computational work represents a stunning advance on the protein-folding problem, a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology. It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted. It will be exciting to see the many ways in which it will fundamentally change biological research.
PROFESSOR VENKI RAMAKRISHNAN
NOBEL LAUREATE AND PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY
In 1969 Cyrus Levinthal noted that it would take longer than the age of the known universe to enumerate all possible configurations of a typical protein by brute force calculation – Levinthal estimated 10^300 possible conformations for a typical protein. Yet in nature, proteins fold spontaneously, some within milliseconds – a dichotomy sometimes referred to as Levinthal’s paradox. These exciting results open up the potential for biologists to use computational structure prediction as a core tool in scientific research Read more
Bizzabo raises $138M for a platform that helps you build and run virtual conferences
“The virtual conference market was almost non-existent” before 2020, said Ben-Shushan. “Pre Covid, a fraction of events were virtual, less than 2% of total events. March 2020 started the virtual transition period in which live events were no longer possible in most parts of the world.”
That transition dovetailed with an even bigger shift in workplace communications: a huge surge of video use spearheaded by the likes of Zoom, Google, Microsoft and many others that had built platforms for people not just to speak to each other over the internet, but to see each other, too. While videoconferencing has been around for years, much of it was based around very costly hardware and software packages used mostly by large corporates. The big innovation was leveraging the growth of faster internet, better basic computers and cameras, and the cloud to make videoconferencing something everyone could use..…. Read more
Gatik raises $25 million for autonomous short-haul delivery trucks
Gatik’s platform taps level 4 autonomous vehicles to fulfill on-demand and scheduled deliveries up to a distance of 200 miles. Its retrofitted trucks and Ford Transit 350 vans and orchestration software, which the company has been testing on public roads in California since Q1 2018, promise to transport goods around city environments more affordably. ….. Read more
Irish start-up which developed facial recognition for cows raising over $50m
Cainthus uses breakthrough predictive imaging to monitor the health and wellbeing of livestock. Its proprietary software uses images to identify individual animals based on hide patterns and facial recognition, and tracks key data such as food and water intake, heat detection and behaviour patterns.
The software then delivers analytics that drive on-farm decisions that can impact milk production, reproduction management and overall animal health.…. Read more
For the first time in its history UNICEF will help feed children in the UK
For the first time UNICEF has launched a domestic emergency response in the UK to help feed children hit by the COVID-19 crisis.
The UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide has likened the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on youngsters to that of the Second World War..…. Read more
In 165 countries, China's Beidou eclipses American GPS
The U.S. was in the vanguard of this technology, launching the first satellite that now makes up the Global Positioning System way back in 1978. But GPS, long the only game in town, is being eclipsed by Beidou.China completed Beidou in June after development began in 1994. Beijing's aims are more than economic.
Data from U.S. satellite receiver company Trimble shows that capital cities for 165 of 195 major countries -- or 85% of those capitals -- are observed more frequently by Beidou satellites than by GPS, Nikkei found.…..…. Read more
Hyundai unveils long range, high performance, two way charging EV platform
Using the E-GMP platform, which stands for “Electric-Global Modular Platform”, Hyundai and Kia will offer electric vehicles with 500 kilometres driving range that can recharge to 80% in 18 minutes ..…. Read more
How the European Union could achieve net-zero emissions at net-zero cost
Paul: I do not normally promote work form Mckinsey but this is too good a piece of work not to pass on.....…. Read more
Drones and AI detect soybean maturity with high accuracy
In a new study from the University of Illinois, researchers predict soybean maturity date within two days using drone images and artificial intelligence, greatly reducing the need for boots on the ground.
“Assessing pod maturity is very time consuming and prone to errors. It’s a scoring system based on the color of the pod, so it is also subject to human bias,” says Nicolas Martin, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at Illinois and co-author on the study. “Many research groups are trying to use drone pictures to assess maturity, but can’t do it at scale. So we came up with a more precise way to do that. It was really cool, actually.”.…. Read more
The War For Digital Nomads Heats Up As Greece Passes New Tax Law
Greece's parliament passed a new law allowing digital nomads to half their income tax. This makes Greece the latest European country to try and woo the new work-from-home workforce, and puts southern Europe against the North in a new talent race.
"If you can work from anywhere, why not work from Greece?" asks a promotional document seen by Greece's parliament this week. Amid dreamy images of whitewashed farmhouses and deep-blue seascapes, it sets out a new law that allows newly settled foreigners to pay half their income tax over the next seven years. ….Read more
This sweater was grown in a bioreactor
A new sweater from the Japan-based companies Goldwin and Spiber looks like it’s made from wool. But the yarn partially came from a bioreactor, not a sheep.
The new material—named “Brewed Protein”—is designed to mimic common fabrics while shrinking their environmental footprint.…. Read more
Steaks Grown From Human Cells Spark Interest and Outrage
The installation of steak grown from human cells at the Design Museum in London was intended to criticize the meat industry’s rising use of living cells from animals. It ended up triggering a roiling debate about bioethics and the pitfalls of artistic critique. …..Read more
Chinese volunteers use flamethrower drone to eradicate wasp nests in village near Chongqing
Blue Sky Rescue, a volunteer group that conducts search and rescue and other emergency work, has teamed up with villagers in Zhong county near the city of Chongqing. They raised 80,000 yuan ($16,225) to buy a drone and equip it with a petrol tank and an arm-length nozzle. Videos released by Blue Sky show a recent mission by the six-rotor drone. It hovers above a hive as large as a suitcase before swooping down...… Read more
Business Tips
Evidence of Long-Distance Droplet Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by Direct Air Flow in a Restaurant in Korea
A total of 3 cases were identified in this outbreak, and maximum air flow velocity of 1.2 m/s was measured between the infector and infectee in a restaurant equipped with ceiling-type air conditioners. The index case was infected at a 6.5 m away from the infector and 5 minutes exposure without any direct or indirect contact. Paul: Important information to consider when thinking about being in doors and looking at ventilation systems …..Read more
Barack Obama shares his approach for making tough decisions
Paul: Not all of us face such tough decisions but this is a vey honest and useful piece to think about decision making. I would read it in conjunction with the article in our most clicked section above on how Jeff Bezos makes decisions…… Read more
Introduction to Foresight
Paul: A useful set of material for thinking about foresight approaches…. Read more
The Art of Strategy: Steps Towards Business Agility
A long but useful set of posts looking at strategy from the point of view of The Art of War, OODA Loops, and Wardley mapping……Read more
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