What's Emerging end of February 2021
A newsletter on interesting stuff that is emerging around the world so you can think about strategy
Introduction
Welcome to our third newsletter for 2021. Melbourne is now back out lockdown as we prepare this newsletter.
In the next few weeks, Paul will continue with two councils on their community vision, running offsite sessions for a new leadership team in the food sector, and working on strategy and foresight for a listed ASX company. Paul will also be working with Save the Children on strategy. Paul will also continue to work on building a consortium model to new organisational approaches in the not for profit sector.
Paul is also acting as lead partner for a Social Venture Partners Melbourne pro bono project with Little Dreamers, a fantastic organisation helping young people who are caring for a family member.
We continue to build our Red Teaming initiative. You can read more about Red Teaming here or you can see the amazing breadth of our team here. More members will be added in coming weeks.
If you want to talk about the use of foresight or red teaming in your strategy for 2021 then please Contact Us.
The Emergent Futures Team
In case you missed it. The most popular link from the last edition:
See GM's futuristic delivery vehicle: Brightdrop!
What are we Writing About?
Paul has written a post entitled: Too Much Solar : Changing solar feed in tariffs will change what happens and when it happens about falling payments for feeding solar energy into the grid.
You can go to our HOME PAGE and look under our latest work read that post and previous posts.
What’s Emerging?
Semitrucks are about to look totally insane
Paul: Autonomous and electric opens up significant possibilities for design change and the results are sort of shocking as they break entrenched mental models on what trucks look like….. Read More
Desalination breakthrough could lead to cheaper water filtration
Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now. ….. Read more
Bearing Brings AI-Powered Operational Efficiencies to the Maritime Shipping Industry
Bearing’s platform is powered by highly accurate ship performance models built on real-world data, allowing it to predict fuel consumption, speed, and other performance factors much more accurately than existing solutions on the market. ..…. Read more
Million-year-old DNA from mammoth teeth found in Siberia is oldest genome ever sequenced
The study, led by a Swedish team, smashed the record for the oldest DNA so far sequenced. The previous record-holder was DNA from a horse that trotted around Canada around 700,000 years ago. . ….. Read more
The Lancet: World population likely to shrink after mid-century, forecasting major shifts in global population and economic power
.…. Read more
HECS-style loan will encourage more carbon farmers: Menzies Research Centre report
An interesting model tying repayments to income levels to encourage investment….. Read more
Meet Elizabeth Ann, the First Cloned Black-Footed Ferret
Her successful cloning is the culmination of a years long collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Revive & Restore, the for-profit company ViaGen Pets & Equine, San Diego Zoo Global and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. .….. Read more
China overtakes US as EU's biggest trading partner
Trade between China and the EU was worth $709bn (€586bn, £511bn) last year, compared with $671bn worth of imports and exports from the US. Although China's economy cratered in the first quarter due to the pandemic, its economic recovery later in the year fuelled demand for EU goods. ..…. Read more
100 virtual work startups substituting business travel
Paul: a very good indicator of change and disruption in this space. Also highlights the difficulty of predicting the future. Who could possibly predict which of these might be successful, let alone one from outside of this group that might beat them all …..Read more
New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency
German chemists have developed two sustainable alternatives to high density polyethylene that can be chemically recycled more easily and nearly 10x as efficiently, thanks to break points engineered into their molecular structures ….Read more
Has COVID really caused an exodus from our cities? In fact, moving to the regions is nothing new
Internal migration resulted in a net loss of 11,200 people from Australia’s capital cities in the September quarter of 2020, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data released this month. At the same time, some regional areas experienced significant growth in house prices as demand for properties increased. So this has raised the questions: are we starting to see an exodus from our cities, and is this related to the COVID-19 pandemic? .…. Read more
Arctic shipper shows off a historical icebreaking voyage
It is the first time that a commercial vessel has sailed across the Northern Sea Route in February. The voyage of the Christophe de Margerie from Jiangsu in China to the remote Arctic terminal of Sabetta was made in the Arctic winter dark and through thick sea-ice. However there is no multi-year old ice in the area. …. Read more
News site Stuff left Facebook. Seven months later, traffic is just fine and trust is higher
In July 2020, Sinead decided Stuff would walk away from its audience of over a million followers on Facebook and Instagram. This followed a move to stop advertising on the platform the year before …..Read more
Here’s the first of Hyundai’s new 800-volt EVs—the Ioniq 5
The Ioniq 5 uses an 800V electrical architecture, that among other things means it's capable of extremely rapid charging—from 10 to 80 percent state of charge in just 18 minutes when connected to a 350kW DC fast charger. Four hundred-volt DC chargers are more common, but some clever tech on the Ioniq 5 means it can use these, too—the motor and inverter handle doubling the voltage to satisfy the battery pack ...… Read more
Business Tips
CommBank announces Green Loan
“The CommBank Green Loan offers an historically low 0.99% p.a. secured fixed rate loan for eligible CommBank home loan customers to fund up to $20,000 in renewables repaid over 10 years with no set up, monthly service or early repayment charges .…..Read more
How Descript Uses AI To Match Room Tone For Seamless Edits
Room Tone, which uses AI to automatically detect room tone in any given recording of speech — and then generates that tone when changing the timing of that recording. Need to add a gap clip between two sentences or paper over an edit without jarring dead air? Room Tone allows you to do that without a second thought (or even a second click). …… Read more
The carbon offset API developer Patch confirms a $4.5 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz
Patch, the carbon offset API developer, has raised $4.5 million in financing to build out its business selling customers a way to calculate their carbon footprint and identify and finance offset projects that capture the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions associated with that footprint. …. See more information
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