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Bringing Emerging Technologies Together, Shoreditch High Street, London (2026)

15/02/2023

Things have been moving slowly at B.E.T.T. but for good reason, after all no amount of money ever bought a second of time!

Moving forward, we plan to use this channel to showcase the latest digital trends currently changing our lives for the better. Majority of these will be posted via our story with the occasional post on our feed. Alongside occasional updates to the business. To begin, let's look at some trending tech predictions for 2023 from a few reliable sources.

Forbes - Top 10 Tech Trends of 2023:

1. AI Everywhere - AI
2. Parts of the Metaverse Will Become Real - AR/VR
3. Progress in Web3 - Blockchain, NFTs
4. Bridging the Digital and Physical World - Digital Twin Technology and 3D Printing
5. Increasingly Editable Nature - Nanotechnology, CRISPR-Cas9 (DNA)
6. Quantum Progress - Quantum Computing
7. Progress in Green Technology - Decentralised Power Grids
8. Robots Will Become More Human - Robots
9. Progress in Autonomous System - Self-Driving Trucks and Ships, Autonomous Delivery Robots
10. More Sustainable Technology - Energy Efficient Technology

Gartner - Top Strategic Technology Trends 2023:

1. Digital Immune System (DIS)
2. Applied Observability
3. AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM)
4. Industry Cloud Platforms
5. Platform Engineering
6. Wireless-value Realisation
7. Superapps
8. Adaptive AI
9. Metaverse
10. Sustainable Technology

PwC - The Essential Eight Building Blocks 2023:

1. Artificial intelligence
2. Augmented reality
3. Blockchain
4. Drones
5. Internet of Things
6. Robotics
7. Virtual reality
8. 3D printing

Please visit the link in our bio to read the full articles!

Credit: Forbes, Gartner, PwC

08/09/2021

5G • When researchers talk network evolution, "G” is the descriptive buzzword. It stands for "generation." We were at 0G in 1940, when the first telephone networks began to roll out. This was the deceptive phase. It took forty years to crawl our way to 1G, which showed up via the first mobile phones in the 1980s, marking the transition from deceptive to disruptive. By the 90s, around the time the internet emerged, 2G came along. But that didn't last long. A decade later, 3G ushered in a new era of acceleration as bandwidth costs began to plummet at a staggeringly consistent 35 percent per year. Smartphones, mobile banking, and e-commerce unleashed 4G networks in 2010. But starting in 2019, 5G will begin to hotwire the whole deal, delivering speeds a hundred times faster at near-zero prices.

How fast is 5G? With 3G, it takes forty-five minutes to download a high-definition movie. 4G shrinks that to twenty-one seconds. But 5G? It takes longer to read this sentence than it takes to download that movie in regions of the UK where 5G is completely accessible. 5G wireless technology is meant to deliver higher multi-Gbps peak data speeds, ultra low latency, more reliability, massive network capacity, increased availability, and a more uniform user experience to more users. Higher performance and improved efficiency empower new user experiences and connects new industries.

5G is based on OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing), a method of modulating a digital signal across several different channels to reduce interference. 5G uses NR air interface alongside OFDM principles as well as wider bandwidth technologies such as sub-6 GHz and mmWave designed to not only deliver faster, better mobile broadband services compared to 4G LTE, but also expand into new service areas such as mission-critical communications and connecting the massive IoT.

07/09/2021

3D Printing • The most expensive supply chain in the universe extends only 241 miles It’s the resupply network running from Mission Control here on Earth straight up to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (or ISS). The expense comes from weight. It costs $10, 000 per pound to get an object out of the Earths gravity well. It can take months to actually reach the Space Station, a significant portion of ISS’s precious real estate is taken up by the storage of replacement parts.

Until now, a company named Made In Space is now in space. On a 2018 ISS mission, when an astronaut broke his finger, they didn't have to order a splint from Earth and wait months for its arrival. Instead, they turned on their 3D printer, loaded in some plastic feed stock, found "splinť in their blueprint archive, and created what they needed, when they needed it. It's a level of on-demand manufacturing capability unlike anything we've seen before.

We can now print in hundreds of different materials, in full colour, in metals, rubber, plastic, glass, concrete, and even in organic matter such as cells, leather, and chocolate. And what we can now print is getting increasingly impressive. From jet engines to circuit boards to prosthetic limbs, 3D printers are fabricating, enormously complex devices in increasingly shorter time frames. This is a big deal for industry. The on-demand nature of 3D printers removes the need for inventory and everything that it demands. Other than the space required for feedstock materials and the printer itself, the technology all but erases supply chains, transportation networks, stock rooms, warehouses, and all the rest. This one development, a single exponential technology, threatens the entire $12 trillion manufacturing sector.

Until the early 2000s, 3D printers were exceptionally pricey machines in the hundred thousand dollar range. Today, they can be purchased for under $1000. As prices have dropped, performance has increased, and convergences have begun to arise-moving 3D printing into a wider variety of markets.

06/09/2021

Wireless Power • Wireless communications, battery-free sensors, RF indentification (RFID), wireless sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), and machine-to-machine (M2M) are systems and concepts that benefit from the use of wireless power transmission (WPT) and energy harvesting solutions to remotely power up wireless devices.

While recent advances in smart phones and wireless utensils appear to be unlimited, the dependence of their operation on batteries remains a weakness, mainly because batteries have a limited lifetime and require a fast charge time to achieve continuous operation. This is where the concept of WPT is useful, bringing together energy and wireless data transmission. This substitutes the traditional powering concept, where a cable or a battery is connected to the wireless device by the transmission of energy over the air in an efficient way to power-up the device.

WPT is, by definition, a process that occurs in any system where electrical energy is transmitted from a power source to a load without the connection of electrical conductors. This is not a new idea, attributed mainly to the work of Nikola Tesla in the late 19th Century. Nevertheless, there are other methods of transmitting energy wirelessly. For example, the inductive power transfer (IPT) is gaining a lot of attention, primarily for short-range charging of devices, avoiding the need of power cables; a well-known and commercially successful example is the induction powered toothbrush, or recent mobile phones being charged by inductive coils. IPT has evolved in the last 20 years into a $1 billion industry.

Although WPT is possible, there is concern regarding the impact of the EM field on the health of the users of the technology. In order to accelerate the adoption of WPT, it is necessary that it operates within a regulatory framework. In order to expedite the regulatory process, companies, universities, scientists and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) must work together to establish agreements, so as to incorporate a unified charging system for a wide range of products.

03/09/2021

Virtual Reality • Presence is a new development. Throughout history, our lives have been limited by the laws of physics and mitigated by the five senses. VR is rewriting those rules. It's letting us digitise experience and teleport our senses into a computer-generated world where the limits of imagination become the only brake on reality.

Most people have a fairly good understanding of what VR looks like. The first component needed to create an immersive experience is a headset that encompasses the field of vision. The simplest VR applications, such as Google Cardboard, stop here but still provide some motion tracking through the sensors in the phone used as the display. More advanced VR systems, such as Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, provide much higher resolution and refresh rate in order to minimise disorientation. They also offer positional tracking beyond head movement to determine the location and movement of the user and to give them the ability to manipulate the environment with their hands. Of course, these improvements come at a cost. High-end VR systems are much more expensive and also require tethering to a PC or game console for heavy-duty processing.

As both VR and AR mature, the two will likely merge in applications that fall under the label "mixed reality." With VR and AR being so closely related, many revenue forecasts present the two in combination. For example, IDC predicts that worldwide revenues for the VR/AR market will rise from $11.4 billion in 2017 to almost $215 billion in 2021. IDC expects the top industry use cases to be retail showcasing, on-site assembly and safety, and process manufacturing training. In the short term, VR is expected to dominate the spending activity, but AR will soon take the lead.

Unlike many emerging technology trends that are extremely broad in scope (such as loT or blockchain), VR and AR systems can be high-functioning even in a smaller installation. The challenges to adoption, then, are more similar to traditional challenges faced when implementing discrete pieces of technology. Eventually, VR and AR will need to fit into an IT architecture growing ever more complex with cost as the major inhibitor.

02/09/2021

Smart Cities and Smart Grids • Broadly speaking, a smart city is one in which data and technology are put to work to improve the lives of citizens and visitors. There is no universal definition of smart city while the concept varies by city and country, depending on the level of development. At the same time, it is also determined by the willingness and aspiration of citizens and governments to implement change and reform.

At the forefront of a smart city’s development is the adoption of advanced technologies to improve urban efficiency. Artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and 5G are examples of technologies that can bring about large improvements to the quality of life.

The Chinese government is a keen supporter of smart city initiatives. In addition to significant technological advancements in recent years, in November 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping endorsed blockchain and the opportunities the technology presents. The endorsement from the top is expected to drive China’s public and private sectors to speed up setting the standards for the application development and adoption of blockchain technologies.

Emerging technologies are being used to power smart cities across the globe while their applications are already being put into practice in real-world scenarios. In Amsterdam, a GPS data platform was developed to help traffic controllers use real-time data to improve the flow of vehicles around the city. This is an example of smart mobility that benefits citizens and facilitates the flow of people. Barcelona has also installed nearly 20,000 smart meters to measure energy consumption and improve efficiency.

29/08/2021

Sensors • Any electronic device that measures a physical quantity like light, acceleration, or temperature, then sends that information to other devices on a network, can be considered a sensor.

We're moving from the world of the microscopic to the world of the nanoscopic. This has already led to a wave of smart clothing, jewellery, and glasses, the Oura ring being one example. A great way to track sleep via heart rate variability and physiological signals. While a number of such trackers were already on the market, these were older models that all had issues. Other examples include Fitbit and the Apple Watch which measure blood flow in the wrist via an optical sensor.

Soon, these sensors will migrate inside the body. Take smart dust, a dust mote-sized system that can sense, store, and transmit data. Today, a "mote" of smart dust is the size of an apple seed. Tomorrow, nanoscale motes will move through our bloodstream collecting data, exploring the interior of the human body. The data haul from these sensors is beyond comprehension. An autonomous car generates four terabytes a day; a commercial airliner, forty terabytes; a smart factory, a petabyte.

So what does this data haul get us? Plenty. Doctors no longer have to rely on annual checkups to track patients health, as they now get a huge amount of quantified-self data streaming in 24/7. Farmers can know the moisture content in both the soil and the sky, allowing pinpoint watering for healthier crops, bigger yields, and an important factor during global warming far less water waste. In business, while knowing everything about one's customers presents an alarming privacy concern, it does provide organisations with an incredible level of dexterity which may be the only way to stay in business in these accelerated times.

Within a decade, we will live in a world where just about anything that can be measured will be measured, constantly. It's a world of exceptionally radical transparency. From the edge of space to the bottom of the ocean to the inside of your bloodstream, our electric skin is producing a sensorium of endlessly available information. Like it or not, we now live on a
hyperconscious planet.

28/08/2021

Robotics • Robots are now entering nearly every aspect of our lives. Today's versions are Al-empowered, allowing them to learn on their own, operate solo and in swarms, walk on two legs, balance on two wheels, drive, swim, fly, and do backflips. Today, robots do jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. Tomorrow, they'll show up any where accuracy and profiency are key. In the operating room, robots are assisting on everything from routine hernia repair to complicated heart bypasses. Out on the farm, robo-harvesters gather crops from the fields and robo-pickers pluck fruit from the trees. In construction, 2019 brought the first commercially available robo-mason, capable of laying a thousand bricks an hour.

A slew of "cobots," short for collaborative robots, are hitting the market. To program them, just move their robotic arms through the desired motion and they're good to go. Even better, these cobots are jam-packed with sensors, so the millisecond they encounter anything like human interaction they freeze. But the real revolution is economic. The UR3, a cobot from the Danish manufacturer Universal Robots, retails for $23,000, which is roughly the average annual global wage for a factory worker. Plus robots never tire, don't need bathroom breaks, and wont go on holiday. This explains why Tesla, GM, and Ford are fully automating their plants and why Foxconn (manufacturers of the iPhone) and Amazon, have already replaced tens of thousands of factory jobs with robots.

We’re also seeing drones mitigating a different disaster: deforestation. We lose over 7 billion trees a year to timber harvesting, agricultural expansion, wildfire, mining, road building, and all the rest. It’s an environmental disaster of epic proportion, both a major cause of climate change and species extinction. Yet there are now tree-planting drones that fire seedpod bullets into the ground, allowing a single
drone to plant as many as one hundred thousand trees a day.

Robotics is already far along its lifecycle, but it’s the convergence of these robots with the likes of neural net-powered Al’s in the cloud that will shape the future of robotics.

03/08/2021

Quantum computing • In classical computing, a “bit” is a tiny chunk of binary information, either a one or a zero. A “qubit” or a quantum bit, is the newer version of this idea. Unlike binary bits, which are an either/or scenario, qubits utilise superposition which allows them to be in multiple states at once. A good way of comparing this is by looking at a coin. Flip a coin, the two outcomes are either heads or tails. In superposition, think about the coin spinning, where both states flash by at once.

Superposition requires close to absolute zero temperatures (0 Kelvin) to achieve, and a lot of power. A classic computer requires thousands of steps to solve a hard problem. A quantum computer can accomplish that same task in two or three steps total. To put this into perspective, when IBM’s Deep Blue computer was placed against the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, it analysed 200 million moves a second. A quantum machine can bump that up to a trillion or more a second.

Currently, the main contestants in the race towards quantum supremacy (build a quantum computer that can solve a problem unsolvable by classical computers) are the tech giants: Google, IBM, Microsoft, academic students of Oxford and Yale, the governments of China and the US, and a key company named Rigetti. This company began in 2013 by raising $119 million to build a next-generation cryogenic pipe cooled to 0.003K in California. Rigetti now manufacture integrated quantum circuits that power quantum computers in the cloud. Currently, this technology does solve one great problem, the end of Moore’s law. A six-decade wave of rising computational capacity and reduction in transistor size.

We have no real idea what innovations will arise once quantum computing actually starts to mature. Because chemistry and physics consist of quantum processes, computing in qubits will usher in a golden age of discovery in new materials, new chemicals, and new drugs. It will also amplify AI, redesign cyber security, and allow us to simulate incredibly complex systems. Exciting times ahead.

02/08/2021

Nanotechnology • Nanotechnology is the outer edge of materials science, the point where matter manipulation gets nano-small. That’s a million times smaller than an ant, eight thousand times smaller than a red blood cell, and two-and-a-half times smaller than a strand of DNA. The idea originally stemmed from K. Eric Drexlers book “Engine of Creation” where he described self-replicating nanomachines that can build other machines. Because these machines are programmable, they can then be directed to produce more of themselves, or more of whatever else you’d like…and because this takes place on an atomic scale, these nanobots can pull apart any kind of material - soil, water, air - atom by atom and use these now raw materials to construct just about anything. This was the original concept and since then this technology has slowly evolved.

We now have a handful of nano-products on the market. Nanoscale additives to fabrics that help them resist wrinkling and staining. Nanofilms that make windows self-cleaning, antireflective, and capable of conducting electricity. Nanocoats that capture the sun’s energy on solar panels.

Nanomaterials make lighter automobiles, airplanes, baseball bats, helmets, bicycles, luggage, power tools - the list goes on. Researchers at Harvard built a nanoscale 3D printer capable of producing miniature batteries less than a millimetre wide. As well as smart contact lenses with a resolution six times greater than today’s smartphones. In medicine, drug delivery nanobots are proving especially useful in fighting cancer. In computing, a bioengineer study Harvard was able to store 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA. On the environmental front, scientists can take Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into strong carbon nano-fibres for use in manufacturing. If we do this at scale, powered by solar, a system 10% the size of the Sahara desert could reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels in about a decade. The applications are endless.

01/08/2021

Internet of Things (IoT) • The IoT consists of a growing network of interconnected smart devices that are beginning to span the globe. Nowadays we see millions of embedded electronic measuring devices such as: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, and so on. Soon, sensors will be used to monitor cities, endangered species, our atmosphere, ships, highways, our bodies, and even the conversations we have with friends and family. If they haven’t started already…

In 2009, the number of devices connected to the internet exceeded the number of people on our planet. This equates to 1.84 connected devices per person. By 2015, this value doubled and by 2030 researchers estimate over 500 billion connected devices which according to Accenture translates into a $14.2 trillion dollar economy. By this point, researchers believe we’ll essentially have a worldwide electric skin that registers just about every sensation on the planet.

A major example of the capability of the IoT and its convergence with AI can be seen in retail when Amazon introduced the Amazon Go store in Seattle in January 2018. Upon entering, visitors scan a QR code on their phone and the AI does the rest. Cameras track customer movements down the aisles and weight sensors built into the shelves do the same for the products. Grab what you want, put it in your bag and head home. On your way out, the cost is automatically charged to your Amazon account. At the same time your transaction settles, sensors built into the rack alert the stores AI. The AI orders another product from the manufacturer and texts the employee to restock the shelf. Trends and insights gathered on the consumer also begin to promote similar products on Amazon and other social media platforms.

The following year Amazon opened seven more stores and has plans for three thousand more by 2025. John McKinsey, a well established journalist and tech entrepreneur, predicts the value of the IoT on retail will be somewhere between $410 billion and $1.2 trillion by 2025. Keep an eye on our connected world.

10/03/2021

Energy Technology • The past decade began with a global economy clawing its way out of the recession. That same year, the Copenhagen Accord and corresponding Cancun Agreements signaled a (mostly) global commitment to hold global average temperature increase below 2°C preindustrial levels. The passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, introduced to stimulate a stagnant U.S. economy, injected more than $100 billion into federal infrastructure and alternative energy initiatives.

Today, clean energy capacity continues to expand apace. According to recently updated projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, solar PV and wind — still the frontrunners of the renewables surge — were together projected to account for three-quarters of all new electric generating capacity in the U.S. in 2020. Innovative use cases for enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are bolstering the feasibility of customer-centric solutions such as transactive energy and energy origin verification. Meanwhile, increased adoption of EVs continues to grow within the transportation industry while smart cities and smart grids slowly evolving throughout the pandemic.

At the end of 2019, the global clean energy economy was worth nearly $2 trillion, achieving an astonishing 40% annual growth rate since 2010. The technology challenges shifted from adoption and scaling of one-off solutions to ecosystem coordination that force us to collectively wrestle with the serious task of rebuilding a nearly 150-year-old machine from the ground up.

Raising the stakes, the energy transition will occur against a backdrop of increasing climate risk. Two-thirds of the global economy measured by country-level GDP is considered not on track to meet the Paris Agreement targets established in 2015. Even more alarming, as measured by Climate Action Tracker, seven of the forecasted ten largest economies in 2030 are showing either minor or no progress toward Paris Agreement targets: Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Russia, and the U.S...

Bringing Emerging Technologies Together

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