New Florence. New Renaissance.

How to turn unveiling of concept car into a giant Kickstarter

When nearly 400,000 people raised their hands for the Model 3 and cemented the conviction with a $1,000 deposit, a new business model in a staid industry was born. While conventional automakers seek board approval to tap cash reserves or issue bonds to pay for new vehicles, the ever-unconventional Tesla showed crowdfunding gets the job done in two weeks.

Even Musk was floored by the response. He anticipated fewer than half the deposits he received and must now scramble to find a way to build all those cars.

Motor Trend

 

Silicon Collar excerpt: Scheid Vineyards

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Another hour south, in Salinas, Tyler Scheid explained the technology changes in an ancient industry tracing back to 6,000 BC:

"Scheid Vineyards is involved in almost every single value stream that you can have in a winery. We sell bulk grapes as well as bulk wine to other wineries. We do custom crush, so we have wineries bring their fruit into our winery, where we process it and then send it back as juice. We'll do custom winemaking all the way from field to bottle. And we produce our own brands."

“Knowing the details of what is in each gondola provides us a huge logistical benefit. In the past, it was a real challenge, especially when you're picking at night, to document the paperwork. Today, you wake up and you can immediately see how much fruit you picked from each field and how much is left. If you got a little bit higher yield than you thought you had, you could immediately start to make adjustments to your next schedule as well as plan to sell more fruit. Automating this data collection with yield monitoring is the next level of automation in harvest data capture that we’re looking to solve. You have the immediate benefits for managing the logistics of a pick, as well as having a yield map output that provides a wealth of information for managing the next vintage crop.”

“Scheid got more excited when he described how machines are helping with irrigation in a state where water is increasingly a major concern:

“Now, at every single ranch we have a weather station that captures rainfall, temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction. We have leveraged our onsite weather network for 20+ years, but just now are using this data to model plant stress and water status. We use a tool called Vintel, from a company called iTK, to do the modeling. It takes parameters such as root depth, canopy size, the major stages of plant growth, and helps us visualize our irrigation targets relative to modeled plant response. The modeling helps us gain more intelligence and value from our sensor assets.””

Photo Credit: Scheid

McKinsey Digital Compass

Digital is not only a means to optimize a company’s existing operations. It also gives both attackers and incumbents the power to disrupt value chains, enter new sectors, and create innovative business models. Established companies face threats from new competitors like Amazon Business, which offers millions of products, from automotive components, industrial lifts, and ramps to lab products, protective gear, and electrical equipment.

To get ahead of threats like this, industrial companies can use digital to transform and extend their own business models before change is imposed on them by attackers reshaping their industry. Some incumbents are joining digital platforms and B2B marketplaces to aggregate demand and sell direct to end users. BASF, for example, was the first chemicals company to sell products online through Alibaba. Other businesses, such as the 3-D printing start-up Sculpteo, are selling services rather than products. Still others are offering their manufacturing capacity as a service to third parties.

McKinsey

Tokyo 2020

A robot directs you to your stadium seat, while artificial meteorites streak across the sky.

Down below, hundreds of performers decked out in traditional Japanese costumes glide through the arena.

You take all this in, as a multilingual translation app on your smartphone describes what's going on.

It sounds like science fiction, but this is the crazy vision that Japan wants to bring to life.

Welcome to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics -- an event that Japan hopes will symbolize the country's high-tech cool, and draw in visitors.

CNN

 

 

Singapore pilots autonomous taxis

For now, the taxis are only running in a 2.5-square-mile business and residential district called "one-north," and pick-ups and drop-offs are limited to specified locations. And riders must have an invitation from nuTonomy to use the service. The company says dozens have signed up for the launch, and it plans to expand that list to thousands of people within a few months.

The cars — modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electrics — have a driver in front who is prepared to take back the wheel and a researcher in back who watches the car's computers. Each car is fitted with six sets of Lidar — a detection system that uses lasers to operate like radar — including one that constantly spins on the roof. There are also two cameras on the dashboard to scan for obstacles and detect changes in traffic lights.

Savannah Now

 

Smartphone service, as-a-service

It finally happened: You cracked your new iPhone’s screen—accidentally, of course. Since your smartphone is effectively an extra appendage, you need to get it fixed as soon as possible.

And you do. Within an hour, a technician shows up at your door, and $109 dollars later, your iPhone is back in action.

This is the average experience for a customer of CellSavers, a startup whose mission is to make mobile device repairs faster, cheaper, and overall, just better.

Fortune

 

Pill Robot

Rus’s team places the accordion-shaped robot into an inch-long, 0.09-ounce pill, which dissolves in the stomach in a minute or two. The robot then expands to 1.4 in. by 0.7 in. by 0.3 in.

It can be guided with a tiny magnet to remove a foreign object from the stomach or treat a wound by administering medication.

Bloomberg

Silicon Collar excerpts: Hampton Creek

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

“Continuing southward in San Francisco, we can get a glimpse at automation in the R&D function. Hampton Creek, which has funding from some of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley, has been identified by Bill Gates as one of the companies shaping the future of food. The start-up’s initial focus was the global poultry industry—which lays two trillion eggs every year—but Hampton Creek is now looking at over 40 new foods, all of which are free of animal products.”

“What if we were to grow grain, extract out a protein that has the same functionality of binding the oil and turn it into mayo. You save all those steps. People don't buy mayo because they want to eat eggs. They buy mayo because they want to eat mayo. In our thinking, egg's just a senseless ingredient. By doing it our way, we just cut out all those steps. We saved on land, water, and energy.

With that conception of how we think about food, what we do on the R&D end is investigate and search the plant kingdom for proteins that are functionality related to food. We source produce from around the world. We bring them in, we do raw materials processing on them using all natural solutions and forces, to size-reduce the material and get it into an aqueous solution. We fraction it out into different protein samples and then we examine each of those fractions for basic molecular and biochemical properties just to understand the fundamental nature of that protein. Then we test it for functionality related to food. A lot of the food chemistry that we assay for is for surface chemistry, water chemistry, structural interaction, etc.”

"We're screening through about 400,000 species of plants in the course of the next couple of years. That would be tough if you're just using the human hand and just the human brain. So, we're investing all these tens of millions of dollars in automation. Our scientists are not staying up all night. The machines are up and running assays. As this data is being generated, hypotheses are being populated into the cloud, and then we can make smart decisions when we actually wake up and analyze the data.

We have a number of plant biologists, molecular biologists and biochemists. We have material scientists, food scientists, and we have automation engineers. We have process engineers, including certification people, and we have our data scientists and computational biologists. No offense to Kraft, General Mills, or Nestle, but I am not sure they could say the same thing about the staff mix in their R&D.”

Photo Credit: Hampton Creek 

Test drive as a service

Hyundai has partnered with Amazon to bring an on-demand test drive program to one of California’s most densely populated urban areas as the automaker looks for new ways to reach customers. The on-demand test drive campaign is also a first for Amazon, a company that is constantly seeking out new ways to become entrenched in consumers’ lives.

This limited campaign—it’ll only be held the last two weekends in August—will give Amazon Prime subscribers living in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas a chance to order a 45- to 60-minute test drive of a 2017 Hyundai Elantra.

Fortune

Night Tube

London finally has all-night service on certain of its Underground routes on weekends.

My question is why did this innovation take so loooooong to get implemented?