5/5 (2)

“… we just try to move 1-2 clicks faster than other companies and sometimes we go too fast and mess up a bunch of stuff and we have to fix it and that’s cool!” – Mark Zuckerberg (2018) (Constine, 2018)

This quote is evidence of Facebook’s dynamic style of working. While Facebook has certainly done good on a large scale this work ethic has also added its share to the election of the current president of the US and has fostered violent and religiously motivated persecutions and killings in Myanmar (Mozur, 2018). At the same time, technology is rapidly turning many industries into platform driven oligopolies, thereby manifesting the position of our beloved Facebooks and Googles. It is undeniable, that we have and will increasingly become exposed to the handful of companies, which have and will “try to move 1-2 clicks faster than other companies”.

In its quest, Facebook is not alone. Its rival, Google, has recently picked up the construction of a search engine for the Chinese market, a precedence case that should teach us two lessons (Meyer, 2018; Bump, 2018). Firstly, even the biggest and most influential companies can be forced to obey regulatory limits set by our governments. Secondly, the fact that many of the involved developers did for a long time not even know what project they were working on shows how detached many non-C-level employees can become from their projects and how little the general workforce is involved in ethical decision-making. In such cases only higher-level executives, which are oftentimes compensated based on short-term goals rather than ethicality are the ones making the decision for our society.

These cases show that we need to actively confine the limits of the front-running tech-companies. We need to set clear regulatory boundaries for ethics and technology. Especially, in times of rapid AI development, such initiatives are non-negotiable.

Let’s not leave it up to the big players alone to inform our regulatory bodies, drive the change and ultimately shape regulations on technology and the future we are living in.

Sources:

Bump, P. (2018). Five ways the Trump campaign was aided by Facebook. [online] The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/facebook-scandal-latest-donald-trump-campaign-presidential-election-cambridge-analytica-steve-bannon-a8269706.html [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].

Constine, J. (2018). Facebook and the endless string of worst-case scenarios. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].

Meyer, D. (2018). http://fortune.com. [online] Fortune. Available at: http://fortune.com/2018/08/17/google-china-search-employees/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].

Mozur, P. (2018). A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].

 

 

5/5 (1)

Last week, one of the world’s biggest tech events of the year opened its doors to the curious minded among us. Techcrunch hosted the 8th episode of its ‘Disrupt SF’ (San Francisco) event, drawing entrepreneurs, investors and techies from all over the world into the bay area. While Disrupt SF is not the largest startup event in the world, its startup battlefield is considered by many the most attractive arena of its kind¹. This year, 21 of hundreds of applicants, were invited to present their startups in front of an expert panel of experienced VC representatives from around the world. In multiple rounds the contestants pitched their ‘next big thing’, demonstrated their products/services and were afterwards challenged by the critical minds of the experts.

In the following, I will introduce the five finalists of this year. It is worth noting that only a discussion of each one of the 21 competing startups would give full justice to the entrepreneurs and the battlefield platform itself. However, for the confines of this blog, I decided to present only a glimpse of the most promising of ideas pitched at this year’s battlefield.

Forethought (Winner)

Forethought built an AI driven enterprise search algorithm that saves employees valuable time that they would have otherwise spent, browsing through internal databases. By facilitating information retrieval from a large variety of data sources (even videos), Forethought promises to significantly reduce the 38% of work time that is spent on searching for relevant information.

Unbound (Runner up)

Having developed a new fashionable vibrator Unbound aims to crush one of the biggest stigmas around female sexuality and health. The two founders are intending to “close the very real orgasm gap” and making sexual health a mainstream topic by informing consumers and putting an unprecedented device in the hands of women. The product, a metal vibrator ring, is firstly targeted towards women, but the founders have already revealed their intentions to create another product for couples.

CB Therapeutics

The biotech startup CB Therapeutics has invented a new way to synthesize the cannabinoid, CBD, cleanly and efficiently. In their labs, based on sugar and yeast as main inputs, they derived CBD, which has great applicability in fighting pain and anxiety. CBD is naturally found in cannabis, however in very small doses. CB Therapeutics claims to have now found a way to avoid the resource-intensive cultivation of cannabis plants by producing CBD on a large scale in the lab.

Mira

Mira provides a solution for women who are having trouble conceiving, in the form of a device that allows to reliably test their fertility level. While several other options already exist in the market, they are imprecise due to practical issues and a lack of customization to the individual woman. Mira, on the other hand, provides a system that not only measures fertility hormone concentrations in the urine but is also customizable to each woman. This step is highly important since every woman differs in health, stress levels, lifestyle, etc.

Origami Labs

Origami Labs presents a new mobile form of voice assisted communication. Their product, a technology loaded ring, utilizes bone conduction to transmit pulses to the human ear. In order to do so, the ring finger simply needs to be held against the outside of the ear. As such, the product represents an alternative to, for instance bluetooth headsets, which would have to be worn semi-permanently inside the ear.

 

In the following, I would like to emphasize 3 key takeaways from this year’s Battlefield:

1. The diversity of new ideas from vibrators, to enterprise information search, to cannabinoid production emphasizes the almost in-exhaustive spectrum of potential business ideas. While certainly some industries are further in their current deployment of cutting edge technologies such as AI, every industry has its blind spots to be filled with new solutions, may they be AI-powered or not.
2. The breadth of technology levels that today’s startups are founded upon. While surely many of today’s startups are centered around data-backed algorithms that drive their business models, not every startup needs to have cutting edge AI running through its veins. This startup battle once more shows that disruption can have multiple source, such as: a new technology (Origami Labs), the versatility of what some coined “the most important general-purpose technology of our era” ² (i.e. AI of Forethought), or the utilization of current socio-trends to rethink and reinterpret current products (Unbound).
3. The high number of data driven and AI powered startups is impossible to be overlooked. The sheer potential and large-scale applicability of Forethought’s AI-assistant in seemingly any information-heavy business is undeniable. Its victory over 20 other high-potential startups from biotech, logistics and many other industrial backgrounds is a clear sign that, in an increasingly data-heavy world, data management will not only be a crucial parameter for efficiency, but it can even become a source of competitive advantage.

In case this blog has triggered your interest in any of the startups, please find a detailed description including their pitches here.

Have you also followed the Disrupt SF Battlefields and do you have other interesting observation or even an entirely different startup that you would have ranked in the top 5?

I am looking forward to your views and opinions in the comments.

Sources:
¹ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2018/09/05/techcrunch-goes-big-on-disrupt-sf-tech-startup-conference-triples-floor-space/#6dd3ac077b1a
² https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence
³ https://techcrunch.com/tag/disrupt-sf-2018/