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In this week's Abundance Insider: Organ-delivering drones, DNA digital data storage, and yet another SpaceX milestone.
Cheers,
Peter, Marissa, Cody, Maxx, Kelley and Greg
P.S. Send any tips to data@diamandis.com, and send your friends and family to this link to subscribe to Abundance Insider.
What it is: This week, UAV manufacturer EHang announced plans to use its human-sized drones to deliver organs to transplant patients, in collaboration with Lung Biotechnology PBC in Maryland. To pull off this feat, Lung Biotechnology will customize EHang's 184 vehicle, which can travel over 10 miles at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour.
Why it's important: One more enabling step for personal transportation vehicles -- and a powerful example of how drones and unmanned aerial vehicles will dramatically accelerate first responders' ability to provide care in emergencies.
Spotted by Greg O'Brien
What it is: Structure is a 3D capture device that plugs into an iPad to create a 3D scan of any physical space or object. While we've seen similar products (e.g. Google's Project Tango), Structure uses commonly available hardware and a lower cost (around $500 for the full developer kit, and the structure sensor is $379).
Why it's important: We're witnessing a race to the "user interface moment" -- the point in time where an interface emerges that makes it fast and easy enough for amateurs to generate (and earn money with) mixed reality environments and dense 3D models.
Spotted by Martin Dell
What it is: Is DNA the next frontier of digital data storage? Microsoft thinks so -- it's just purchased 10 million strands of synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience for experimentation. Futurism reports that Microsoft's initial tests revealed that they can encode and recover 100 percent of binary data from synthetic DNA. Twist Bioscience uses a semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process, which it says offers "unmatched scale and product quality."
Why it's important: "Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded," explained Twist Bioscience CEO Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D. in a press release. "DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs."
Spotted by Aryadeep S. Acharya
What it is: Water may be scarce now, but it won't be for long. Scientists at India's Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) are using waste steam from a nuclear reactor to desalinate seawater -- and they're already producing 6.3 million liters of purified water per day. BARC's desalination process also includes a purification step that can transform even arsenic- and uranium-tainted water into safe drinking water.
Why it's important: When we can transform any water source -- no matter how polluted or contaminated -- into potable water, we enable breakthroughs in health, longevity and global transformation. This desalination method, which is already rolled out throughout India, is one step closer to that future.
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
What it is: Researchers at the University of South Wales in Australia have made a major breakthrough: the world's highest efficiency rating for a full-sized, thin-film solar cell. Other thin-film cells are made from toxic materials like cadmium and selenium, or rare materials like indium and tellurium, but the UNSW team used a CZTS cell made of nontoxic, Earth-abundant materials: copper, zinc, tin and sulfur.
Why it's important: One step closer to thin-film solar cells that are cheap, efficient and safe enough for ubiquitous use in residential, commercial and industrial applications.
Spotted by Peter Diamandis
What it is: University of California at Irvine researchers recently developed a battery that can take 200,000 charge cycles -- 400 times the charges that a traditional lithium battery can take. What's even more surprising about this development is that it was entirely by accident. The lab had been working on using gold nanowires instead of lithium to create a solid-state battery, and Ph.D candidate Mya Le Thai had an idea to cost the nanowire with manganese oxide and then suspend it in an electrolyte gel for protection.
Why it's important: Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from non-experts. This single discovery could lead to rechargeable batteries that last forever -- a tremendous leap forward for anything that needs power.
Spotted by Aryadeep S. Acharya
What it is: Smartstones is a platform and accompanying app that turns any sensory IoT device (think EEG headsets) into a communication interface using "thought messages" -- text messages or app-based push messages created solely by thinking them. Using an EEG headset and Smartstones' app (called :prose), anyone -- including those with autism, ALS, deafness, brain injuries or spinal cord injuries -- is able to communicate simply and effectively with the world around them.
Why it's important: Smartstones is a promising user interface for thought-to-text communication. "Communication is the most important part of the human experience and we want to ensure every person has the ability to express their most basic needs," explains Smartstones CEO Andreas Forsland. "With 2.3 million nonverbal children in the USA with autism alone, and over 70 million on the autism spectrum worldwide, everyone has a unique need when it comes to a communication interface."
Spotted by Greg O'Brien
What it is: Electrek reports some fascinating news out of the UAE: Dubai recently received bids for $.0299/kWh for 800MW of solar power, which represents the lowest recorded price for solar power thus far. This article also highlights recent solar energy pricing trends around the world, with extensive forecasting and financial projections.
Why it's important: Overwhelming evidence that solar energy hasn't stopped its exponential price-performance growth -- and some of the most substantial developments are happening outside of North America and Europe.
Spotted by Gabriel Delgado Ayau
What it is: This week marks another new space milestone, thanks to Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX. Quartz reports: "This is the first time that the company has landed a rocket that flew to 'geosynchronous transfer orbit,' or GTO. That means it set its satellite cargo on a path to reach an altitude where the speed of its orbit will match the speed of Earth's rotation, allowing it to 'hang' over one place, about 36,000 kilometers above us."
Why it's important: While this SpaceX achievement has tremendous potential for the space industry and interplanetary travel, there's an even more exciting implication for Abundance Insider readers. Quartz's reporting continues: "The most lucrative satellites are those that hang over one spot on earth in their geosynchronous orbits. Introducing reusability into that launch market is key to lowering the price and growing SpaceX's market share. And, at a time when numerous companies are developing cheap solutions to launch satellites in to low-earth orbit, ensuring dominance at the highest of altitudes will insulate SpaceX from those competitors."
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
What it is: Honda, Mori Inc and Map have created a concept called "Honda. Great Journey" that shows seven futuristic self-driving transportation concepts. These designs show off how future autonomous cars might navigate tricky terrain like rainforests, cracked ice, deserts and mountains.
Why it's important: An innovative and visually appealing glimpse into the future of how highly specialized autonomous cars will move us forward. (By the way, this advertorial is also a great example of how big brands can help usher their customers into the future -- and, as a result, earn and/or maintain their trust and loyalty.)
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
This email is a briefing of the week's most compelling, abundance-enabling tech developments, curated by Marissa Brassfield in preparation for Abundance 360. Read more about A360 below.
At Abundance 360, Peter's 250-person executive mastermind, we teach the metatrends, implications and unfair advantages for entrepreneurs enabled by breakthroughs like those featured above. The program is highly selective and we're almost full, but we're still looking for a few final CEOs and entrepreneurs who want to change the world. You can apply here.
Know someone who would benefit from getting Abundance Insider? Send them to this link to sign up.
Cheers,
Peter, Marissa, Cody, Maxx, Kelley and Greg
P.S. Send any tips to data@diamandis.com, and send your friends and family to this link to subscribe to Abundance Insider.
What it is: The e-volo Volocopter VC200 is the world's first certified multicopter -- and it just received its permit to fly as an ultralight aircraft in Germany. The electric personal aerial vehicle takes off and lands vertically using a simple joystick control, and e-volo boasts that its design is easy enough for anyone to pilot it. The company's next goals are to initiate air taxi services, enter the air sports market, and continue its autonomous mobility development.
Why it's important: As autonomous vehicle technology continues to improve, futuristic transportation methods like this one may become a cheaper, easier and faster mode of travel than even self-driving taxis on the ground. Expect to see even more innovative approaches when the Transporter XPRIZE launches.
Spotted by Ryan Wolfred
What it is: Drone racing is gaining widespread popularity, and the University of Florida broke new ground in this niche with the first-ever brain-controlled drone race. Sixteen pilots used BCI software, electroencephalogram headsets and their focused thoughts to send drones down a 10-yard indoor course.
Why it's important: Another early demonstration of BCI advancements. It won't be long until we can interact with objects around us -- in our homes, at work and everywhere else -- just using our thoughts. Talk about magic!
Spotted by Keith Gargiulo
What it is: What if the black carbon found in air pollution could be transformed into industrial paint? That's exactly what Sbalabs is doing with Kaalink: "repurposing pollution's carbon capture to industrial-grade raw material for [the] printing industry (inks, pigments, paints, etc).
Why it's important: With aftereffects like premature death, bronchitis, heart attacks and aggravated asthma, air pollution is definitely a billion-person problem. This process takes carbon out of the air and turns it into a raw material with thousands of industrial applications -- now that's turning scarcity into abundance!
Spotted by Rajat Gupta
What it is: Modivius, whose chips power everything from FLIR cameras to DJI drones, has announced the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, a USB drive that enables users to rapidly prototype neural networks. "Fathom contains the Myriad 2 MA2450 VPU paired with 512MB of LPDDR3 RAM," Engadget explains. "The Myriad 2 is the chip found in the previously mentioned DJI and FLIR products... [and] can handle up to 150 gigaFLOPS (150 billion floating-operations per second) while consuming no more than 1.2 watts."
Why it's important: An impressive dematerialization and demonetization of neural networking capabilities. It has the form factor of a normal thumb drive, but Engadget writes that using just this USB drive and a Raspberry Pi, any user can add "advanced computer vision capabilities to something like a GoPro."
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
What it is: University of Washington students Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor have developed SignAloud gloves, a set of gloves with the power to translate American Sign Language into text or speech. The glove's sensors record movement and transmit gesture data wirelessly to a central computer, which then parses the data and dictates all recognized gestures through a speaker.
Why it's important: How do you think about your customer base when you no longer have language barriers? These lightweight, inconspicuous gloves let sales representatives, customer service agents and teachers communicate with ASL speakers in a natural, seamless way.
Spotted by Greg O'Brien
What it is: Futurist Ramez Naam has analyzed how cheap electric cars can get, and his predictions are exciting: by 2030, electric vehicles with a 200-mile range will be cheaper than the least expensive car sold in the U.S. in 2015. Naam backs up his claim by citing enabling factors like improvement in batteries and production efficiency increases.
Why it's important: As the materials and technologies behind renewable energy continue to improve, prices will continue to plummet -- which will only accelerate their adoption.
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
What it is: KurzweilAI.net reported two key developments that suggest deep learning algorithms are just as effective as humans at detecting cancer from ultrasound images and in identifying cancer in pathology reports. The first was the development of Samsung Medison's RS80A ultrasound imaging system, which features a built-in deep learning algorithm for breast lesion analysis. The second was a study out of the Regenstreif Institute that found open-source machine learning tools to be as good or better than humans at "extracting crucial meaning from free-text (unstructured) pathology reports and detecting cancer cases."
Why it's important: Shaun Grannis, M.D. describes the importance perfectly: "We have come to the point in time that technology can handle this. A human's time is better spent helping other humans by providing them with better clinical care. Everything -- physician practices, health care systems, health information exchanges, insurers, as well as public health departments -- are awash in oceans of data. How can we hope to make sense of this deluge of data? Humans can't do it -- but computers can."
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
What it is: Ray Kurzweil's Playboy interview went live this week, in which he illustrates several future scenarios in depth. Topics include the future of sex, the future of education, nanobots in our bloodstream, and how humans are merging with nonbiological technologies.
Why it's important: Ray's lifetime predictions about the future are accurate over 80 percent of the time, so anytime you have a chance to hear or read one, take note. Tracking technology's progress and making proactive business decisions are essential skills in this exponentially growing world.
Spotted by Peter Diamandis
What it is: Elon Musk recently made a bold safety claim about Tesla's Autopilot function: "The probability of having an accident is 50 percent lower if you have Autopilot on. Even with our first version. So we can see basically what's the average number of kilometers to an accident -- accident defined by airbag deployment. Even with this early version, it's almost twice as good as a person."
Why it's important: One more piece of evidence that autonomous cars will be significantly safer and more efficient than human-driven cars.
Spotted by Marissa Brassfield
This email is a briefing of the week's most compelling, abundance-enabling tech developments, curated by Marissa Brassfield in preparation for Abundance 360. Read more about A360 below.
At Abundance 360, Peter's 250-person executive mastermind, we teach the metatrends, implications and unfair advantages for entrepreneurs enabled by breakthroughs like those featured above. The program is highly selective and we're almost full, but we're still looking for a few final CEOs and entrepreneurs who want to change the world. You can apply here.
Know someone who would benefit from getting Abundance Insider? Send them to this link to sign up.
This blog explores how to run great experiments in your company, based on recent conversations with my friend Astro Teller, Chief of Moonshots at "X" (formally Google X, Google's R&D factory).
X's mission is to invent and launch "moonshot" technologies that could make the world a radically better place… dare I say, help create a world of Abundance.
Astro leads a team of brilliant engineers, scientists and creatives developing solutions to dozens (perhaps hundreds) of the world's toughest problems. Some of their publicly known projects include: the self-driving cars, the smart contact lens, high-altitude wind-power generation, and Project Loon, just to name a small fraction.
All of these projects started as a series of experiments.
Today's most successful companies, the ones that are "crushing it," started as a series of crazy ideas, followed by experiments to test just how viable those ideas might be.
Experimentation is a crucial mechanism for driving breakthroughs in any organization.
BTW, you may also want to check out Astro's 2016 TED talk which was just released: The Unexpected Benefit of Celebrating Failure.
Experiments help you test a hypothesis about your product or service and help you find answers to your most difficult questions.
Good questions are questions that, if answered, fundamentally change (and improve) the way you operate.
Understanding how to focus your team on asking good questions and turning good questions into experiments is critical.
So what makes a good experiment?
Astro explains that the following three principles describe a good experiment:
Principle 1: Any experiment where you already know the outcome is a BAD experiment.
Principle 2: Any experiment when the outcome will not change what you are doing is also a BAD experiment.
Principle 3: Everything else (especially where the input and output is quantifiable (i.e. measurable)) is a GOOD experiment.
Seems simple enough, right?
You need to be asking questions to which you don't know the answer but such that if you did know the answer, you'd change the way you operate.
If you already know the answer, or if you are testing an insignificant detail that doesn't matter, you'll just be wasting time and money.
In any organization, you get what you incentivize.
In order to get good questions/experiments, you have to create a culture that incentivizes asking good questions and designing good experiments.
Astro describes a very unique approach to doing just this:
"At X, we set up a 'Get Weirder Award'. The whole point of the Get Weirder Award was to focus the team on experiments and to drive home why they needed to think in terms of experiments."
Teams would be challenged to ask "weird" questions – to put forth crazy ideas around framing problems differently and to design experiments that really push the limits.
Critically, Astro gives out the Get Weirder Award before the experiments are run.
"If you give out the award before you've run the experiment, then people start to really feel that you don't actually care about the outcome. You care about the quality of the question. So every two weeks, we would give out an award for the best experiment."
Doing so constantly (and viscerally) reinforced the behavior of asking good questions – and as such, at X, they've built a culture around celebrating the questions themselves.
Once you've designed a good experiment and assembled an intellectually diverse team to tackle it, what are the best management principles to keep from screwing it up?
Management Principle 1: Don't Be a Bottleneck!
As a CEO or manager, it is critically important that you don't get in your team's way by micromanaging them or by demanding to be the sole decision maker.
If you need all of the information, all of the time, your team will never get their work done.
Astro explains, "Your job as a manager is to give your team your recommendations and empower them to do whatever they think is right. Allow them to learn."
He continues, "I work super hard for me not to be the bottleneck at anything that goes on here. Ironically, that's a full-time job."
One funny story involved two employees who had a major strategic conflict. They wanted Astro to make a decision as to which one was right.
Rather than do so, he said, "I believe I already know which of you is right and which of you is wrong. I can just make that decision right now, but I'm not going to. The problem is: if I tell the two of you who's right and who's wrong, in my opinion, the next time you have conflict, you will come back and ask me to do it again, and that does not scale. I will spend however as much time it takes to either train the two of you to work well together or figure out that you can't."
Not being a bottleneck means deliberately letting your team learn. Sometimes it's hard to do, but it's a necessary step if you want to derive the most value from your experiments.
Management Principle 2: The Value of Secrecy
In a previous blog, I mentioned the notion that ambitious entrepreneurs (and companies) need to get comfortable with being misunderstood.
Interestingly, experiments are one of the most publicly misunderstood domains within a company.
We talked in great depth in the last blog about why you have to focus on killing your ideas –in line with that discussion, an experiment that proves an idea won't work is as successful of an experiment as proving that one will work!
The problem is: the public (and especially the press) doesn't understand this.
They see "failed experiments" and think, "failed company" – which adds enormous pressure and stress to your employees and investors.
Thus, it can be useful to keep your experiments secret.
Astro explains, "The main value of secrecy is not 'to hide our awesome ideas', it's to make it easier to kill ideas. Secrecy offers air cover. It allows the team to have the emotional space to solve the problems without outside pressure."
Management Principle 3: Don't Worry about Success -- Worry about Progress & Learning
Finally, if you are worrying about success, you are going to be paying attention to all of the wrong indicators and misguiding your team.
You need to focus on progress and learning – and success will follow.
Rather than creating a culture that only celebrates big wins, create one that celebrates progress on tough projects and running good experiments.
You'll be amazed by the difference in your organization with such a small mindset and cultural shift.
This is the sort of conversation we explore at my 250-person executive mastermind group called Abundance 360.
The program is highly selective. If you'd like to be considered, apply here.
Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.
This blog is part of a series I am doing on "Hiring, Culture, and Experimentation". If you have questions or comments about these topics, tweet at me @peterdiamandis and @codyrapp, and we'll incorporate them into our research.
P.S. Every week I send out a "Tech Blog" like this one. If you want to sign up, go to Diamandis.com and sign up for this and Abundance Insider.
P.P.S. I've just released a podcast with my dear friend Dan Sullivan called Exponential Wisdom. Our conversations focus on the exponential technologies creating abundance, the human-technology collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Head here to listen and subscribe: a360.com/podcast
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