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Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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The talk at Climate Week, an annual event hosted by the Climate Group and New York City that takes place in conjunction with the UN General Assembly, focused on how currently only 17% of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets are on track for 2030, with nearly half making minimal or moderate progress, and over one-third stalled or in some cases regressing. But the news was not all negative. A report published by the World Economic Forum this week highlights how some of the world’s largest companies are transforming to address their impact on the environment.
Carbon offsets will no longer cut it. Increasingly urgent action from businesses is being demanded to preserve and restore ecosystems that communities depend on. In 2022, 196 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which created an international mandate to halt and reverse nature loss. Companies have a key role to play in this transition towards “nature- positive”, spurred on by the GBF’s target to “encourage and enable” businesses to “assess, disclose and reduce biodiversity-related risks and negative impacts”, says the Forum report.
The report features six case studies that describe how companies have started to address their impact on land, the ocean or freshwater within their operations and across their value chains. The companies are headquartered in six countries and conduct operations across major sectors ranging from energy to agriculture. They include Inter IKEA Group, a multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture; Aditya Bitla Group, a global conglomerate that operates companies across 22 industry sectors, spanning fashion, finance, mining and more; Yara, a crop nutrition knowledge and products company; global retailer Walmart; Ørsted, a multinational energy company; and Suntory Holdings, a global producer of soft drinks, beer and whisky.
Read on to learn more about this story and this week's other important technology news impacting business. |
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| Like many large companies around the world Apollo Tyres, an Indian company that sells tires in 100+ countries, wants to gain a competitive edge with Generative AI. It has six enterprise-grade Gen AI pilot projects in the works: half of them with young companies based at Hyderabad’s T-Hub, one of the world’s largest innovation accelerators Apollo has opened a 2000 square foot mobility center of excellence (Digital Innovation Hub) at the accelerator as part of an open innovation program focused on everything from supply chain optimization to manufacturing. “The problems we are trying to solve need a lot of innovative technology and design thinking,” says Harsh Vardhan, Apollo’s head of digital innovation. “In the last 8 months we were able to vet 130 plus startups at T-Hub and have signed NDAs with 32 of them.” The Indian tire company is one of a number of corporates, such as Boeing, Novartis, Citibank and Pepsico, that have either set up outposts or regularly work with T-Hub, a 5,85,000 square foot facility that can house up to 1,000 startups and serves as one of the key program delivery partners for Invest India and Startup India. T-Hub’s neighbor T-Works, a state-of-the-art makers lab which is also part of the Telangana ecosystem, serves as India’s largest hardware prototyping center (and the second largest in the world). It has attracted the involvement of corporates like Qualcomm and Honeywell and global organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Care, an international humanitarian agency that focuses on emergency relief and long-term international development projects.
But it would be a mistake to think of T-Hub and T-Works as places that mainly serve as a one-stop shop for large international organizations to cherry pick the best technologies and entrepreneurs. T-Hub and T-Works exemplify how India is shifting from a service economy that focused on helping others innovate to an” innovate in India” philosophy, says Lasya Nadimpally, T-Work’s senior marketing director. |
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Who: Dr. Sana Amairi-Pyka is the Lead Scientist for Quantum Communications at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Since 2021, she has been leading the Abu Dhabi Quantum Optical Ground Station (ADQOGS) project, aiming to position the UAE as a pioneer in space-based quantum communication technologies and ensure the global availability of secure free-space optical communication networks. She is a scheduled speaker at the Xpanse conference in Abu Dhabi November 20-22,
Topic: The future of data encryption
Quote: "It is clear that in many places, QKD [ Quantum Key Distribution] adoption is already underway. This is important, as current forecasts suggest the threat to traditional cryptosystems posed by quantum computing is accelerating, and migration to a comprehensive quantum-safe strategy (including QKD) can't happen overnight."
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| Israel’s RGo Robotics is pioneering an artificial perception technology that enables mobile robots to see, understand and navigate autonomously like humans in complex environments.Its patent-pending computer vision and AI technology are being used to guide Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) robots and Automated Mobile Robots (AMRs) for logistics and manufacturing as well as last mile delivery and service robots in consumer markets.
Think of it as the next generation of robotics. “RGo enables mass adoption of intelligent automation with AI by powering mobile machines with human level perception,” says Yael Fainaro, RGo’s President and Chief Business Officer. “Robotic solution providers across industries are adopting RGo’s vision and AI perception software to drive higher ROI for their customers in shorter time and enable a range of advanced AI capabilities, including GenAI powered decisions and insights, to drive value and stay ahead of the competition.” |
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Amount Google paid to rehire Noam Shazeer, a co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom. The official reason for the eye popping payment was to license the technology of Character AI, a startup launched by Shazeer after he quit Google in 2021. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. Within Google, Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee, the story said. The 48-year-old engineer is now one of three people leading Google’s efforts to build the next version of its most powerful AI technology, Gemini. Shazeer made hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in Character as part of the deal, sources told the Journal. The payout is unusually large for a founder who didn’t sell his company or take it public. Generative artificial intelligence has sparked a huge spending boom and a war for talent as companies and investors bet hundreds of billions of dollars that the technology will transform the global economy.
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Cybertech Europe 2024, Rome, Italy, October 8-9
GESDA, Geneva, Switzerland, October 9-11
XPanse 2024, Abu Dhabi, November 20-22
TiE Global, Bangalore, India, Dec. 9-12
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