Lifeboat Foundation

They used to be the billion dollar start-ups. Now we call them unicorns, a term coined five years ago by Aileen Lee of Silicon Valley-based Cowboy Ventures. In mythology, unicorns are rare, beautiful creatures. It was the perfect name – until recently.

Now unicorn is taking on new meaning: start-ups that perpetuate the myth that they are worth a billion US dollars.

These days, it does not take much money to claim a US$1 billion valuation – under US$200 million in some cases. Nor do you have to be a leading edge or disruptive tech company. Many unicorns, especially those in China, are simply smartphone apps applied to businesses that have been around for decades.

Continue reading “The only thing mythical about unicorns these days is their valuation” »

“We should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies—that is already done,” Assefa argues.

That makes sense to academics like Singh — though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. “But any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.”

A 2017 report (pdf) by the World Wide Web Foundation suggested that Ethiopian “intelligence services are using machine intelligence techniques to break encryption and find patterns in social media posts that can be used to identify dissidents.” And while mobile phone and internet penetration in Ethiopia is comparatively poor—a situation made worst amid widespread anti-government protests, which prompted an internet crackdown in February — the report added that government surveillance and oppression could increase as the use of smartphones expands.

Continue reading “Futurists in Ethiopia are betting on artificial intelligence to drive development” »

Sometimes, while waiting for quantum computers to become a thing, or complaining that your stupid laptop keeps dying on 5 percent battery, it’s easy to forget just how far technology has come over the past 50 years.

Sure, we can all list off a whole bunch of innovations that have changed the way the world works — the Internet, smartphones, radio telescopes — but it’s hard to really put that kind of change into perspective.

Thankfully, pictures often speak louder than words, and so below are nine photos that’ll make you stop and raise your *praise hand* emojis to the sky in honour of the scientists and engineers that have got us where we are today.

Continue reading “These 9 Incredible Images Are a Mind-Boggling Remind of How Far Technology Has Come” »

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“Artificial Intelligence is not just a large part of a technological revolution, it’s a major part of a human evolution of going beyond the limits of an environmentally programmed human biological operating system.”

Continue reading “The Human Advantage Over AI — Artificial Intelligence” »

Samsung proudly announced today that its “unbreakable smartphone panel” has been certified by Underwriters Laboratories (UL). This means this ultra durable display is much closer to very profitable things like military and automotive contracts. But let’s be serious. Somebody’s gonna find a way to break this thing, and I hope it’s me.

The new display owes its anti-destructive tendencies to a couple of innovations. Samsung says that the OLED panel has “an unbreakable substrate.” (A substrate is basically the coating that holds the display’s organic material, cathodes, and diodes together.) Additionally, the Samsung display uses a flexible new type of plastic that won’t crack like glass. So you can supposedly drop it, smash it, and bend it without breaking the display.

By providing an ultra-high native resolution chip with built-in binning of pixels, Sony hopes to let smartphone users have their cake and eat it too — both amazing detail and good low-light performance.

Researchers have identified a group of materials that could be used to make even higher power batteries. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used materials with a complex crystalline structure and found that lithium ions move through them at rates that far exceed those of typical electrode materials, which equates to a much faster-charging battery.

Although these materials, known as niobium tungsten oxides, do not result in higher energy densities when used under typical cycling rates, they come into their own for fast charging applications. Additionally, their physical structure and chemical behaviour give researchers a valuable insight into how a safe, super-fast charging battery could be constructed, and suggest that the solution to next-generation batteries may come from unconventional materials. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

Many of the technologies we use every day have been getting smaller, faster and cheaper each year—with the notable exception of batteries. Apart from the possibility of a smartphone which could be fully charged in minutes, the challenges associated with making a better battery are holding back the widespread adoption of two major clean technologies: electric cars and grid-scale storage for solar power.

Continue reading “New class of materials could be used to make batteries that charge faster” »

The new display is a combination of flexible OLED panel and fortified plastic cover, with certification from Underwriters Laboratories backing up the unbreakable claim. It’s so strong, no damage was visible after 26 drop tests from a height of 4 feet.

You should already be using two-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access to your online accounts. While your phone is up to the task of helping you with that, Google believes it’s time for to take the next step: using a physical security key.

At its ongoing Google Cloud Next event, the company announced that it’s launched the Titan Security Key, which lets you log in to your account on your desktop by authenticating your identity with over USB or Bluetooth.

Check out TNW’s Hard Fork.

Continue reading “Google wants you to use its new physical keys to secure your account” »