Do your part to support quality journalism. Sign up for a subscription today. To remind you, our annual plan works out to a monthly rate of €24.99+ VAT. It will give you access to a archive of over 800 independently reported stories and some 200 new ones in 2022. Enjoy this week's issue, Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker |
|
- N E W S I N C O N T E X T - |
|
Siemens and NVIDIA plan to pair digital twin models with real-time AI to create what the two companies are calling an industrial metaverse. “The digital twin is the virtual representation of the real product and the value of that digital twin is how closely we can bring the virtual world and the real world together,” Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens explained in a press briefing. The merger of the two companies’ technologies means “we can now fuse data from the point of design, all the way through product life cycle management, all the way through the automation of plants to the optimization of the plant after deployment — that entire life cycle can now be in one world,” NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. The two companies promise that the industrial metaverse will allow manufacturing customers of any size to be able to immediately analyze issues, identify root causes, and simulate and optimize solutions, thanks to the AI-infused, real-time photo realistic virtual environments. So, for example, if something goes wrong on the factory floor, teams of users from around the world will be able to meet, virtually, to collaborate and use the connected digital twin to quickly identify, troubleshoot and solve the problem. Read on for more on this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.. |
|
Wood has always played an important role in the production of bourbon, but Woodinville Whiskey is taking it to a whole new level. The U.S. company’s newly completed warehouse (pictured here) - one of six 25,000 square-foot structures that will house its small-batch bottling, barrelling, and ageing facilities in a rural part of Washington state - is being built with an eco-friendly modified wood that serves as an alternative to building materials with a much higher carbon footprint. Produced by Oslo-based Kebony, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, the modified wood has also been used to build hotels, apartment buildings, a theater, and family homes in Europe and the United States over the past 36 months. It’s part of a trend. Wood not only reduces the amount of Co2 used in the building process; it serves as a carbon sink, storing the Co2 taken from the air by trees that are harvested and used as engineered timber. The race to Net Zero is putting pressure on all companies to reduce their carbon footprint and is changing the way buildings are constructed and renovated, says Norman Willemsen, CEO of Kebony, which describes itself as an “environmentally friendly wood modification technology company.” “Kebony is very much in demand as an alternative to products like concrete, steel and tropical wood,” he says. “We provide a safer, better, greener construction material.” |
|
- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K - |
|
Who: Sarah Theinert is Director Partnerships & Value Creation at UVC Partners, a venture capital firm which connects startups to a network of 150+ corporates through its close partnership with Munich-based UnternehmerTUM (UTUM), a leading European innovation center . Prior to joining UVC Partners in 2022, she was Senior Manager in the Platforms and Acquisitions team at Allianz X, the digital investment unit of German multinational financial services Allianz Group. Topic: How to work with startups and adopt a company-wide innovation culture. Quote: "A couple of years ago it was all the rage to appoint a dedicated technology person in every department whose job it was to ready the company for the digital age. Innovation can be approached in a similar way. Now that companies are digital or tech-ready they need to become innovation-ready and nominate dedicated people throughout the company to lead the change." |
|
- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K - |
|
The fact that industrial connected devices and machines can be highjacked or manipulated by outsiders has worried critical infrastructure providers and manufacturers ever since it was revealed in 2010 that Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm that targeted Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) devices, caused substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear program. The digitalization of industry and tensions with Russia have heightened those concerns. NanoLock Security, an Israeli scale-up, aims to allay those fears with technology that promises to prevent cyber attacks, sabotage and human error-based accidents involving IIOT, SCADA devices, industrial machines, programmable logic controllers and industrial control systems. NanoLock applys a device-level Zero Trust security approach to prevent unauthorized attempts to modify the way machines or devices function. Customers include electric companies, manufacturing companies, industrial machine manufacturers and logistical centers. It’s worldwide clients all have something in common: they operate machines that are “a critical part of the organization” and disrupting their function “can harm lives, operational integrity and business continuity,” says CEO and Co-Founder Eran Fine. |
|
- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K |
|
Savings Walmart says it has made in its annual cloud computing costs by developing the capability to switch seamlessly between cloud providers and its own servers, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. The retailer said it has used its own servers and software to deploy one of the largest so-called hybrid clouds in existence. The company’s hybrid system draws on third-party platforms from Microsoft and Alphabet's Google as well as an internal server network it has rapidly built out across Walmart facilities in the U.S. The company said it now has 10,000 edge nodes and has also built custom software that allows it to run its back end operations across any cloud system. Walmart's approach offers a road map to other organizations that want to reduce their dependence on giant technology companies. |
|
|
|