StartUp and Innovations Digest #17July2016

A few weeks ago I was in the bookstore for searching materials to read, as you could imagine it was about innovations & startups. Thanks to that catching day I have a really good book to read where I can take inspiration from practical examples.

So, I wanted to share with you one of the moments from the book.

“At the end of the day, if you’re an inventor, you’re going into the unknown”

Let’s start our Digest with next news:

#MarijuanaInChocolate This beautiful line of marijuana edibles was created by an ex-Apple employee

“A former Apple employee, Eric Eslao, to redesign the way we think about marijuana edibles.

His newly launched company, Défoncé Chocolatier, delivers one of the most beautiful and user-friendly lines of marijuana edibles we’ve seen.

Each bar contains 180 milligrams of THC, the ingredient in cannabis that makes users high; eaten in full, it would probably produce an hours-long, paranoia-wracked nightmare of an evening. But the bar features a three-dimensional design that divides doses into 18 pyramids, or 10-milligram doses, which is closer to a couple hits off a pipe.”

#SpaceTech VCs are getting serious about spacetech

Valery Komissarov is a VC at Skolkovo Foundation, a government-backed firm based in Moscow,  where he covers space tech and drone companies. He wrote a good article about the current situation among SpaceTech startups and VCs.

“We now have private companies building reusable rockets, providing global Internet access via satellites, and exploring numerous other space-based businesses.

Space-related startups are no longer just a bunch of aerospace engineers lacking business experience.

They are ambitious companies with successful track records and world-changing plans.”

Some last founded SpaceTech startups:

“Orbital Insight raised a $20 million Series B round just a couple of weeks ago. The company combines deep learning and satellite imagery to provide insights into worldwide economic trends and global processes for a variety of customers, from asset management firms to non-profit organizations, such as the World Bank.”

“Another good case is BlackSky Global. Just a few days before Orbital’s raise, BlackSky — a subsidiary of Spaceflight Industries— raised a $25 million Series B. The company plans to launch a constellation of 60 remote sensing satellites with sub-meter resolution that will pass over major economic areas and large cities up to 70 times a day.”

More details about other SpaceTech startups you can find in the article.

#India Which is the hottest startup hub in India this year?

Q2 2016 startup funding in India. Image source: Xeler8.

#TechPeopleOnInstagram The 19 best people in European tech to follow on Instagram

If you are interested in Tech and have Instagram you would probably appreciate this list of most interesting (according to Business Insider) people in the European tech community.

Business Insider ranked some of Europe’s best tech Instagrammers according to how good their photos are, how regularly they post, and what they post snaps off.

19. Dailymotion CEO Cedric Tournay. WHY? Tournay enjoys experimenting with a filter while traveling to Asia and beyond.

13. Michael Acton Smith, Mind Candy founder. WHY? Acton Smith has been known to post photos of Lamborghinis and flying cars.

3. Eugene Kaspersky, a security expert. WHY? Kaspersky is a big fan of the great outdoors, with recent trips to Iceland and Tenerife.

1. Hannah Waldram, community creative producer at Instagram. WHY? Waldram literally works for Instagram.

Check other people in the article.

#Innovation A New Era Of Innovation

“For the past 20 or 30 years, innovation, especially in the digital space, has been fairly straightforward.

That led most innovation efforts to be focused on applications, with a heavy emphasis on the end user. Startups that were able to design an experience, test it, adapt and iterate quickly could outperform large enterprises that had far more resources and technological sophistication. Agility was often the defining competitive attribute.

Yet in the years to come the pendulum is likely to swing from applications back to the fundamental technologies that make them possible. In many ways, we’ll be starting over again and innovation will look more like it did in the 1950’s and 1960’s.”

“Consider quantum computing and neuromorphic chips, two post Moore’s law technologies that are likely to become widely deployed after 2020 and that function very differently than traditional computing frameworks. While we know theoretically what the potential of these should be, in practical terms, we know very little. After all, nobody has ever used them before.

There are also completely new fields emerging such as genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which are truly cutting edge technologies that require Ph.D. level specialists to work with them.

Another thing to consider will be resource constraints. There are relatively few trained specialists in areas like machine learning and those that are qualified are rumored to be paid like professional athletes.”

As we enter this new era of innovation,collaboration will become a key competitive attribute. It will no longer be enough to be agile and disrupt, we will have to discover and build.

#Stories When Yahoo Ruled the Valley: Stories of the Original ‘Surfers’

“Back in the mid-1990s, before Google even existed, the world’s best guides to the internet sat in Silicon Valley cubicles, visiting websites and carefully categorizing them by hand.

They were called surfers, and they were a collection of mostly 20-somethings — including a yoga lover, an ex-banker, a divinity student, a recent college grad from Ohio hungry for adventure — all hired by a start-up called Yahoo to build a directory of the world’s most interesting websites.

Today, with more than one billion websites across the globe, the very notion seems mad. Even then, there was a hint of insanity about the enterprise.”

In this article, you will discover who were the first surfers in Yahoo and their stories. It’s an interesting article.

P.S. There is a very short story. In some cases, the inventors spend days mingling with users at places like farms or hospitals, so that they could observe people and ask them questions like “Why are you doing that?”

or another

When someone says you “I don’t need your idea”, you don’t have to throw your drink in his/her face; instead, you have to ask “Why?”.

I wish you have a good day, observe and ask “Why”?