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Category: business – Page 108

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Digital twins enable enterprises to model and simulate buildings, products, manufacturing lines, facilities and processes. This can improve performance, quickly flag quality errors and support better decision-making. Today, most digital twin projects are one-off efforts. A team may create one digital twin for a new gearbox and start all over when modeling a wind turbine that includes this part or the business process that repairs this part.

Ideally, engineers would like to quickly assemble more complex digital twins to represent turbines, wind farms, power grids and energy businesses. This is complicated by the different components that go into digital twins beyond the physical models, such as data management, semantic labels, security and the user interface (UI). New approaches for composing digital elements into larger assemblies and models could help simplify this process.

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The fully reusable Starship could launch as soon as next month.

Another private customer has signed up to use SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship rocket. Sky Perfect JSat penned a contract with SpaceX to launch its Superbird-9 communications satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit in 2024, the company announced in a press release.

The Tokyo-based firm revealed little about the specifics of the deal. However, according to Sky Perfect JSAT, Superbird-9 is a high-throughput satellite that “will deliver broadcast and broadband missions in Ku band primarily over Japan and Eastern Asia, in response to mobility and broadband demands.”

Starship: SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle.

This is the SKY Perfect JSAT Group SKY Perfect JSAT signed Launch Service Contract for Superbird-9 satellite with SpaceX page. SKY Perfect JSAT Group commands the largest communication satellite business in Asia and is the only in Japan to offer the multichannel pay TV broadcast service SKY PerfecTV!

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Montana this month gave a City of Billings contractor approval to build homes using 3D-printed walls for new construction in the state. The technology Tim Stark, the contractor, is using comes from Apis Cor, a Florida-based technology company that emphatically states on its website, “We print 3D buildings.”

The first time I encountered Apis Cor was when I wrote about the state of 3D-printed buildings back in 2016. Then Apis Cor was Russia-based and was working with a U.S. company. The website links in my posting back then for both the Russian and U.S. company no longer work. So I am guessing that the Apis Cor of today represents the evolution of both the technology platform as well as the business.

The current version of Apis Cor has constructed a number of pilot homes in the U.S. and the biggest 3D-printed building in the world in the United Arab Emirates. The technology has complied with some international building code standards but not yet in the U.S. Getting regulatory approval from the state of Montana, however, will likely open the door to seeing 3D printers being used more extensively here in North America, and can help lower the cost of home builds and solve growing demand.

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Star Scientific invents a catalyst that in the presence of hydrogen and oxygen heats to 700 Celsius. That’s enough heat to drive a steam turbine for power generation.

Star Scientific is a 25-year-old research laboratory north of Sydney, Australia. The company is one of many trying to make existing power plants carbon-free. This includes old coal-fired thermal power stations which remain among the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. Star has invented a patented non-polluting catalyst which it calls HERO® which is an acronym for Hydrogen Energy Release Optimizer. It uses hydrogen without producing combustion.

Mars Food Australia, the subsidiary of the global food giant, is using HERO® to help decarbonize its processes. The 18-month pilot project is the first step in developing alternative heat sources for the food industry. Bill Heague who is General Manager of Mars in Australia states, “Thermal energy is crucial to the business of cooking food and this technology has the capability to create limitless heat without any combustion and zero emissions.”

But this is only the beginning because Star has plans to introduce the technology into legacy coal-fired power plants to retrofit existing generators to run on green hydrogen. In an interview with Bloomberg Green, Andrew Horvath, Chairman of Star Scientific states, “We think there are a lot of opportunities in existing steam turbines that have some longevity…Why would you throw them away? They’re already connected to the grid.” He cites the example of Japan where 70% of its existing turbines still have 40 years of life left.

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Nuclear power will be capable of generating 38.4 percent of Poland’s electric power needs by 2043, and should raise the country’s GDP by over 1 percent, a report by the Polish Institute of Economics (PIE) has forecast.

The report, titled “Economic aspects of nuclear investment in Poland — influence on business, the labor market and local communities,” also says that the nuclear energy program will generate 40,000 jobs over the next five decades.

According to the most optimistic scenario, 70 percent of the value of the investments in nuclear energy should be realized by Polish companies, and the total investment realized by them could reach close to $40 billion.

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If the combination of Covid-19 and remote work technologies like Zoom have undercut the role of cities in economic life, what might an even more robust technology like the metaverse do? Will it finally be the big upheaval that obliterates the role of cities and density? To paraphrase Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: The place to be was Silicon Valley. It feels like now the place to be is the internet.

The simple answer is no, and for a basic reason. Wave after wave of technological innovation — the telegraph, the streetcar, the telephone, the car, the airplane, the internet, and more — have brought predictions of the demise of physical location and the death of cities.

Remote work has become commonplace since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the focus on daily remote work arrangements may miss a larger opportunity that the pandemic has unearthed: the possibility of a substantially increased labor pool for digital economy work. To measure interest in digital economy jobs, defined as jobs within the business, finance, art, science, information technology, and architecture and engineering sectors, the authors conducted extensive analyses of job searches on the Bing search engine, which accounts for more than a quarter of all desktop searches in the U.S. They found that, not only did searches for digital economy jobs increase since the beginning of the pandemic, but those searches also became less geographically concentrated. The single biggest societal consequence of the dual trends of corporate acceptance of remote work and people’s increased interest in digital economy jobs is the potential geographic spread of opportunity.

Page-utils class= article-utils—vertical hide-for-print data-js-target= page-utils data-id= tag: blogs.harvardbusiness.org, 2007/03/31:999.334003 data-title= Who Gets to Work in the Digital Economy? data-url=/2022/08/who-gets-to-work-in-the-digital-economy data-topic= Business and society data-authors= Scott Counts; Siddharth Suri; Alaysia Brown; Brian Xu; Sharat Raghavan data-content-type= Digital Article data-content-image=/resources/images/article_assets/2022/08/Aug22_04_509299271-383x215.jpg data-summary=

The labor market for jobs you can do on a laptop is expanding beyond major cities.

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Please see my article published today in Skytop Strategies. Thanks and have a great weekend!

Essential emerging technology: companies are woefully unprepared by chuck brooks.

Link to article:

Chuck Brooks, President of Brooks Consulting International, is a globally recognized thought leader and subject matter expert on Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies. LinkedIn named Chuck as one of “The Top 5 Tech People to Follow on LinkedIn.” He was named by Thomson Reuters as a “Top 50 Global Influencer in Risk, Compliance,” and by IFSEC as the “#2 Global Cybersecurity Influencer.” He was featured in the 2020 Onalytica “Who’s Who in Cybersecurity” – as one of the top Influencers for cybersecurity issues. He was also named one of the Top 5 Executives to Follow on Cybersecurity by Executive Mosaic. He is also a Cybersecurity Expert for “The Network” at the Washington Post, Visiting Editor at Homeland Security Today, Expert for Executive Mosaic/GovCon, and a Contributor to FORBES. He has also been a featured author in technology and cybersecurity blogs & events by IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, Cylance, Xerox, Malwarebytes, General Dynamics Mission Systems, and many others. He recently presented to the G20 on Energy Cybersecurity.

Chuck is on the Faculty of Georgetown University where he teaches in the Graduate Applied Intelligence and Cybersecurity Risk Programs. In government, Chuck was a “plank holder” at The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) serving as the first Legislative Director of The Science & Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security. He served as a top Advisor to the late Senator Arlen Specter on Capitol Hill covering security and technology issues on Capitol Hill. He has an M.A from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from DePauw University.

The 4th Industrial Era

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Weighing cost vs. benefit

For small business owners, implementing sustainability initiatives may seem more like a pipe dream than a tangible goal, as the technology can be costly to implement. What’s more, businesses that are using technology to drive sustainability must employ talented workers who can tap into those resources and streamline operations for the greatest economic and environmental benefit.

However, as companies can leverage automation and data analytics to increase efficiency, adjust energy usage, reduce waste and otherwise help with sustainability, the cost of investing in automation is worth it. By giving company leaders the ability to see the big picture in terms of carbon footprint, data and automation can help optimize operations and improve a company’s bottom line.

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