DIGITAL. TRENDS. FUTURE.

02
Sep

WEF Technology Pioneers 2011 announced: GetJar, foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, Spotify etc.

The World Economic Forum has announced the Technology Pioneers 2011. 31 companies have been named Technology Pioneers. I met Rodolfo Lara Torres who is in charge of the Technology Pioneer Program a few times and posted an interview in 2009.

This year a few New Media and Web companies are listed aswell, e.g. foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, Cleantech is dominating the Pioneer List. Here are the WEF Technology Pioneers 2010:

CLEAN TECH
Digital Lumens, USA
Digital Lumens integrates LEDs, networking and software into a single “smart” system that promises improved efficiency, control and operational oversight of lighting at industrial facilities. The system can reduce customers’ lighting-related energy use by up to 90%.
http://www.digitallumens.com/

Ecovative Design, USA
Ecovative’s vision is to grow sustainable products that directly replace plastics. Its products require far less energy to create, can be grown from many different regional feedstocks and can be composted without processing in backyards and gardens.
www.ecovativedesign.com

Ferrate Treatment Technologies, USA
Ferrate Treatment Technologies (FTT) makes a patented reactor small enough to fit into the back of a pick-up truck that can disinfect up to 20 million gallons of water a day and do the job more cheaply than harmful chemicals or competing technologies. The ferrator strips electrons from liquid iron to make ferrate; the most powerful, multi- purpose environmentally-friendly water and wastewater treatment chemical known.
www.ferratetreatment.com

Flexoresearch Group, Thailand
Flexoresearch has developed a series of novel blended enzymes that recovers pulp/fibre from laminated paper waste, such as milk cartons, and uses it to replace the virgin pulp now used to make new paper. The recovered pulp/fibre can also be used in building materials and to make vehicle brake pads for the automotive industry.
www.flexoresearch.com

Novacem, United Kingdom
The cement industry alone is responsible for 5% of man-made CO2 emissions and, up until now, has not had low-carbon solutions to deploy at scale. Enter Novacem, which has developed a new type of cement which absorbs more CO2 than it emits during production.
www.novacem.com

On-Ramp Wireless, USA
On-Ramp Wireless’s Ultra-Link Processing (ULP) System enables the low-power monitoring and control applications used in smart grids, industrial sensing and location tracking.
www.onrampwireless.com

OPOWER, USA
OPOWER has designed a behaviour-based, energy- efficiency program that helps utilities motivate their customers to save energy.
www.opower.com

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Canada
Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies has developed a new generation of wastewater treatment systems that not only helps treatment plants run more efficiently but also solves major environmental issues and provides a new revenue stream for municipalities: commercial fertilizer.
www.ostara.com

Quintas Renewable Energy Solutions, Nigeria
Founded by a physician dismayed at the loss of life when power outages occur during childbirth and surgical operations, Quintas develops inverters specially designed to meet the challenges that poor and erratic power generation and distribution pose to people in Nigeria whose businesses and daily activities require continuous power supply.
www.quintasenergies.com

TaKaDu, Israel
Water scarcity is one of the biggest issues facing the world. There is not only not enough clean drinking water to go around, the world loses much of what it does have through leaks in ageing water networks. More than four and a half billion gallons of water are lost in transit every day in the United States, according to the US Geological Survey, and 25% to 35% of water is lost every year worldwide, according to the World Bank. This is where TaKaDu comes in. It is tackling the multibillion dollar problem by bringing a smart grid approach to the water sector.
www.takadu.com

Tendril, USA
Tendril helps both consumers and utilities manage energy consumption. Its smart grid technology helps utilities achieve better load balance. And, the company’s technology, a software-as-a-service model, provides a two-way communication link between energy utilities and their customers, giving consumers more specific information about their energy use.
www.tendrilinc.com

Topell Energy, Netherlands
Topell Energy has developed a highly efficient method of making solid biofuel from woody biomass, a process known as torrefaction. Torrefaction of biomass cuts transportation costs and renders the conversion of biomass into power and heat more efficient. Torrefied biomass is an environmentally-friendly and practical alternative to fossil coal.
www.topellenergy.com

Transonic Combustion, USA
Transonic Combustion makes a fuel injection system that offers automotive manufacturers a near-term, cost- effective solution to vastly improve fuel economy of new cars and trucks, and help meet stringent emissions regulations.
www.tscombustion.com

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW MEDIA
Aster Data, USA
Companies are now amassing terabytes and even petabytes of data. As volumes explode, traditional databases have become bottlenecks, hampering corporations from getting deep insights into consumer behaviour, real-time fraud analysis and patterns and trends that could improve their business. Aster Data, founded by three PhD students at Stanford University, is helping companies overcome this challenge by providing an innovative new technology to store and rapidly analyse huge volumes of data.
www.asterdata.com

Atlassian, Australia
Atlassian builds software to help technical teams collaborate more effectively. The company, which has made seven acquisitions in the last eight years, raised an additional US$ 60 million in venture capital in July 2010. It has over 20,000 paying customers in 134 countries, including Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, major investment banks and Formula One teams.
www.atlassian.com

foursquare, USA
Foursquare is a popular online service combining location, gaming and social networking that lets people “check in” and report their location to help find friends or tips about the place they are visiting.
www.foursquare.com

GetJar, Lithuania/USA
GetJar is the second largest apps store, after Apple’s. The company’s key point of difference is its open market approach, which allows it to deliver applications to telephone across all major platforms such as Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian. It offers more than 70,000 mobile applications to consumers in more than 200 countries. The company has so far generated more than 1 billion application downloads.
www.getjar.com

Knewton, USA
Education is beginning its Internet moment. Within 10 years all educational textbooks are expected to be digital, delivered through powerful e-readers. Students everywhere will be able to take accredited Web-video classes led by some of the world’s best teachers. Knewton’s mission is to bring data mining to this transition, by offering analytic tools for teachers and adapting concepts to the way individual students learn.
www.knewton.com

Layar, Netherlands
Fancy knowing what the Berlin Wall looked like before it fell? Thanks to Layar you can, by simply pointing your mobile phone at the location. The company helps people better understand context through an emerging mass medium called augmented reality.
www.layar.com

NetQuin Mobile, People’s Republic of China
Today’s smart phones are tiny computers, complete with operating systems, storage and wireless access to company’s internal networks, making them an enticing target for hackers and Internet criminals. That is where NetQin Mobile comes in. Based on a cloud security platform, the company delivers mobile security services, including anti-virus, anti-spam, privacy protection, data backup and restoration, and online virus scan to 51.5 million users worldwide. The company controls 68% of the market in China for mobile security – it is the only provider of anti-spamming service to China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator ? but some 30% of its user base is outside of China.
www.netqin.com

OpenDNS, USA
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a 25-year-old crucial part of the Internet’s infrastructure, which encompasses the routing system used to transfer data, such as e-mails. OpenDNS’ mission is to push control of the DNS to the periphery, enabling consumers and network administrators to secure their networks from online threats, reduce costs and enforce Internet use policies without the use of software or costly appliances.
www.opendns.com

ReputationDefender, USA
ReputationDefender specializes in helping consumers and business shape how they are seen online. It sells different security products on a monthly subscription basis, allowing consumers and businesses to monitor information about themselves across the Web, bury undesirable information and promote vetted content to the top of research results.
www.reputationdefender.com

Scribd, USA
John Adler, Founder of 2008 Technology Pioneer Accuray and inventor of the CyberKnife, encountered a lot of barriers to publishing one of his papers in a medical journal. The peer review process and glacial pace were frustrating. Adler realized that what he really wanted was to quickly make his paper accessible to as many people as possible. Adler’s complaints led his son Trip and his classmate from Harvard to create Scribd, a Web 2.0 document-sharing site that aims to make it easy for anyone to publish original work on the Web and find a readership.
www.scribd.com

SecondMarket, USA
In the last decade, the time from company formation to initial public offering has extended from five to 10 years, leaving employees, founders and venture capitalists with limited means to get liquidity in the interim. SecondMarket gives the marketplace an alternative
to going public or selling companies. It is the world’s largest centralized marketplace and auction platform for trading illiquid financial assets that cannot be traded in the public markets.
www.secondmarket.com

Spotify, United Kingdom
Spotify, founded by European serial entrepreneur Daniel Ek, is a digital music service that works across multiple hardware platforms, offering music fans an alternative to the two other main options now available: Apple’s iTunes and piracy. It has rapidly grown from a small Swedish music service to an international company with 7 million users across six European countries, generating more revenue for rights holders than Apple iTunes in some territories.
www.spotify.com

Vortex Engineering, India
Vortex Engineering develops automatic teller machines for rural environments, adapting them to run on lower amounts of power and to dispense soiled banknotes.
www.vortexindia.co.in

LIFE SCIENCES AND HEALTH
Adimab, USA
Adimab was founded by two of the world’s leading yeast biotechnologists, Dartmouth’s Tillman Gerngross and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dane Wittrup, with the goal of significantly speeding up the drug discovery process while improving the overall quality of therapeutics. The two professors have built an antibody discovery and optimization platform that is broadly applicable to all disease and can be accessed by the entire pharmaceutical industry.
www.adimab.com

Ion Torrent, USA
Ion Torrent is pioneering a radically faster and cheaper approach to gene sequencing by marrying simple chemistry to powerful, proven semiconductor technology. The company is the third headed by Rothberg to be named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Rothberg is credited with inventing massively parallel sequencing. His team at 454 and the Baylor Genome Center was the first to make public the sequence of
an individual human genome. He is also credited with initiating the Neanderthal Genome Project with Svante Paabo.
www.iontorrent.com

Medicine in Need (MEND), South Africa
Millions of people in the developing world die needlessly each year because of infectious diseases such as TB, HIV and malaria that could otherwise be prevented or treated. Medicine in Need (MEND) aims to ensure the world’s poorest people get access to effective, life-saving drugs and vaccines by reformulating existing products to make them more suitable to administer in developing countries and by assuring that new discoveries in these areas yield sustainable products that can be commercialized.
www.medicineinneed.org

Molecular Partners, Switzerland
Molecular Partners is working on novel medicines based on designed ankyrin repeat proteins (DARPins), a promising class of non-immunoglobulin proteins that can offer advantages over antibodies in drug discovery and drug development.
www.molecularpartners.com

Neuronetics, USA
Despite major advances in treating depression, nearly 30% of patients do not benefit from drug therapy and more than one-half report side effects that lead to non-compliance with medication such as sexual dysfunction, weight gain and sleep disorders. Neuronetics has developed the NeuroStar Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Therapy System, which uses magnetic field pulses to stimulate nerve cells in an area of the brain that is linked to depression. This stimulation increases brain activity and releases neurotransmitters which are known to elevate mood. The treatment is typically administered daily over four to six weeks to patients who have not responded to traditional treatments; it is free of systemic side effects.
www.neuronetics.com

30
Aug

Google Products #Fail

Get an overview of all products were Google was not successful – Google Products #Fail. At the Google Graveyard you can find Google Catalog, Google Video Player, Google Answers, Google Wave, Google Audio Ads, Dodgeball, Jaiku (Now Part of Google Buzz), Google Page Creator and many more….

But for true Innovation, failure and mistakes are very important. So we’ll see what the people at Google will invent in the future.

Google Products #Fail

30
Aug

The WIE Symposium (Women: Inspiration & Enterprise)

I met Arianna at the Monaco Media Forum, where she briefly introduced me to the idea of a Women Network. A few month later she announced the first Event of the WIE Network. I am looking forward to attend the inaugural symposium in New York in a few weeks.

The WIE Symposium (Women: Inspiration & Enterprise) is the annual conference of the WIE Network hosted by Sarah Brown, Arianna Huffington and Donna Karan. The WIE Network is a forum for professional women to network and connect.

Sarah Brown, Wife of former UK Prime Minister, is the Chairwoman of The WIE Symposium which will be held on September 21st, 2010, in New York City. Drawing on the legendary drive and energy of New York City, the Symposium is a motivating and results driven gathering of creative women, working together to achieve social change and inspire the next generation of women leaders and advocates.

The symposium takes place at the newly renovated “Skylight West” located steps from Midtown, the Javits Center, Chelsea Galleries, and the Highline. It also features the city’s largest open rooftop, offering a gorgeous view over the skyline of the city and sunset of the Hudson River.

Find out more about the WIE Symposium at www.wienetwork.org

25
Aug

Most Famous Facebook Pages killing Brand Websites

Facebook has quietly become the biggest relationship-marketing provider for many brands.

For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based “owned media” is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.

Facebook Fan Pages

Coca-Cola, with its 10.7 million Facebook fans, has three to four times the Facebook fan base as MyTown and Foursquare have registered users. (There are at least 11 brands whose Facebook fan pages have quietly grown bigger than the biggest geo-location providers.) That certainly trumps U.S. unique visitors to Coke’s brand website, which fell by more than 40% to 242,000 in July compared to a year ago, per Compete.

Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook as tracked by DBM/Scan, with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day. But the multi-brand site where its web presence has been hosted, NabiscoWorld.com, has seen U.S. traffic decline from 1.2 million in July 2009 to 321,000 last month.

(Via AdAge)

25
Aug

Infographic: Tracking Google’s Acquisitions.

Ever wondered what companies Google bought during the last couple for years. There is a complete list of acquisitions by Google on Wikipedia, but I also like the following Infographic “Tracking Google’s Acquisitions”.

Google Acquisitions - Venture Capital

19
Aug
19
Aug

Facebook Places

Mark Zuckerberg has presented the new location based service “Facebook Places” yesterday. Facebook is addressing the market Foursquare, FriendTicker etc. has opened up.

18
Aug

eBay Movie & Twitter Movie (Parody of the Social Network “Facebook” Movie)

One month after the release of the Movie Trailer of “The Social Network”, aka “The Facebook Movie”, two parodies are getting a lot of attention. Have a look yourself.

Twitter Movie Trailer

eBay Movie Trailer

21
Jul

Biomimic Marketing

The new trend in Marketing. Getting a touch of nature into your technology products. Imitate and mime biological structures, gestures and movements and merge it with the latest 3D animation methodoligies – The Result: “Biomimic Marketing”.

Biomimic Marketing in Action – Watch this example from AT&T:

1stAveMachine-CelebrateSpring from MotiongraphicLAB on Vimeo.

Another example of Biomimic Marketing is BMW’s Concept Car “Gina”:

20
Jul

Dog Modding

I just love the new trend from China “Dog Modding”. Here you can see a nice “Tiger Dog”.
Don’t you think?

Tiger Dog Modding - Tiger Hund
The newest thing amongst dog owners in China seems to have emerged from this understandable fantasy and could be described as something like dog-modding: the color-dying of dogs, to make them look like other animals. Like this retriever, that is painted like a tiger.

Fake or Reality?
Look at this nice Panda Dog.
Panda Dog - Dog Modding
A more convincing example of dog-modding can be found in Wuhan, capital of the Hubei province, central China. A Chinese man modded his dog into a Panda – and did quite well so. As many will know, the Panda is a threatened animal, but also the national symbol of China. All living Panda’s in zoo’s all over the world are gifts from the Chinese government and are also considered state-property of the People’s Republic of China. The Panda es extremely popular in China – you could speak of a cult almost. But keeping a panda for yourself, of course, is strictly forbidden. So here the simulation comes in handy.

(Via NextNature)

15
Jul
15
Jul

Apple Flatscreen TV

After the launch of the iPhone 4, what does Apple work on right now?

Steve Jobs said at the “All things digital” (D8) conference last month that “Apple TV is still a hobby”. Jobs explained that the market is complicated due to the diversity of key players and a complex distribution system. Between the lines you could understand that Steve Jobs is thinking about a controllable and user-friendly system. An ecosystem which Apple already created in the Music (iPod) and in the Mobile (iPhone) market.

So that’s why I created a fast scribble of an “Apple Flatscreen TV” which I would mount onto my living room wall. My draft of the Apple Flatscreen TV would have a 50″ LED Screen with an improved small remote control, connectivity to my iPad, iPhone and other Macs in the house, a wireless connection to a Bang & Olufson speaker system and a big harddrive of approx. 5 TB.

Is Apple already working on such an “Apple Flatscreen TV”?

Apple Flatscreen TV

13
Jul

GE’s $ 200 million open innovation challenge

Today GE announced the start of a $200 million open innovation challenge that seeks breakthrough ideas to create a smarter, cleaner, more efficient electric grid, and accelerate the adoption of more efficient grid technologies. GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled the challenge, the “GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid,” here today.

The global challenge invites technologists, entrepreneurs and start-ups to share their best ideas and come together to take on one of the world’s toughest challenges – building the next-generation power grid to meet the needs of the 21st century. The challenge is one of the largest ever and is open immediately at www.ecomagination.com/challenge.

“Innovation is the engine of the global effort to transform the way we create, connect and use power,” Immelt said. “At GE we have invested broadly and deeply in digital energy solutions and see this as a substantial market for us, but we can’t do it alone. We want to work with our partners to make sure we have a comprehensive digital energy offering. This challenge is about collaboration and we are inviting others to help accelerate progress in creating a cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid. We want to jump-start new ideas and deploy them on a scale that will modernize the electrical grid around the world.”

The Challenge, launched in collaboration with leading venture capital firms Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer and RockPort Capital, and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired magazine, is part of GE’s ecomagination initiative, a global commitment to build innovative clean energy technologies and will help fund the most promising ideas. Proposals are sought in three, broad categories: Renewables, Grid and Eco Homes/Eco Buildings. Select Challenge entrants will be offered the opportunity to develop a commercial relationship with GE through:

  • Investment: the $200 million capital pledge of GE and its partners will be invested globally into promising start-ups and ideas
  • Validation: evaluate entrant’sbusiness strategy through in-depth discussions with GE’s technical and commercial teams
  • Distribution: explore partnership opportunities with GE to scale a business and create global reach
  • Development: leverage GE‘s technical infrastructure and GE Global Research Centers to accelerate technology and product development
  • Growth: explore opportunities for utilizing existing GE customer to take Challenge products to market

The $200 million commitment will help bring these new ideas to market by providing businesses and individuals with theopportunity to secure growth capital through GE investment and/or investment by participating venture capital firms. It is open to anyone aged 18 years or older and all legally formed entities.

06
Jul

Global Internet Users

Globally there are almost 1.6 billion Internet users, half of them from Asia – 738 million users. Most of the asian internet users are from China.
Note: Compare 1.6 billion to over 4 billion mobile phone subscribers globally – who will win?

Global Internet Users 2010

09
Jun

Open Sessions at DLD Women Conference

The World Economic Forum is known for its “Open Forum” as part of the annual meeting in Davos. Today Steffi, Co-Chair of DLD and DLD Women, told me that at the inaugural DLD Women Conference they will integrate an Open Session, too.

So, here is your invitation. Feel free to share and forward!

DLD Women Conference 2010 - Invitation

01
Jun

Live from the catastrophe

BP’s live video stream of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is simultaneously tragic and hypnotic. With each passing second, more gallons of crude oil and natural gas escape into the ocean.

Beside watching this live video from the catastrophe, I recommend reading the ironic (not official) BP Twitter channel @BPglobalPR.

For BP, Obama and the whole USA it has turned from a pure catastrophe for nature into a catastrophe in public relations and reputation.

07
May
17
Apr

Volcano Info Graphic

I am still enjoying my “Volcano Weekend” in United Kingdom, as I got stuck in London right after the Skoll World Forum which was held in Oxford. Here is a helpful Info Graphic about the Volcano and the Cloud.

Volcano Info Graphic

17
Apr
08
Apr

Apple is Re-Thinking Mobile Advertising

Apple is entering the mobile advertising business and aims at high emotional and interactive ads. Here is a great example of an iAd of Toy Story. After a click on the small banner within an iPhone App you won’t leave the app directing you to a website. The user experiences a smooth change to a branded environment, the iAd. It opens like a regular app, but due to the new multitasking you can still keep the other app open.

The Toy Story iAd then shows an overview with several options and buttons. One option is to watch a few in-ad videos, play in-ad games or open the in-ad shop and buy the product right away. This might redefine mobile advertising and opens completely new ways to market products on a mobile devices.

Apple iAd - Mobile Advertising Example with Toy Story