Lifeboat Foundation

But their cash-burning tactics to attract users and uncertain business models turned out to be unsustainable. By 2017, the bubble was already bursting – yet another casualty in big tech’s seemingly endless proxy wars for users and market share, leaving a trail of broken companies, and bikes, in their wake.

Mobike officially halted operations of the mobile app and WeChat mini programme under its own brand last week, fully merging under its parent company Meituan.

This is another example of how autism is now being used as an advantage in business. What people previously saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength. 😃

Gordon Douglas struggled to find work because of his “differences”. Now his neurodiversity is making him a sought-after employee.

In the not so distant future you could be making money from home by controlling robots, robots that are in another country. Or there will be products, such as a self driving Tesla car, that can go out and earn money on their own.

This video takes a look at the futuristic ways people will be earning money. From telepresence jobs and future business ideas, to new space businesses, and even how people will be storing their money — moving away from cash and credit cards to using chips that are in their bodies.

Continue reading “Making Money in a Futuristic World (Jobs and Future Business Ideas)” »

Is the author of the book Free To Choose Medicine: Better Drugs Sooner at Lower Cost; a book that offers a compelling argument for the freedom of every patient, guided by the advice of his or her doctor, to make informed decisions about the use of not-yet-FDA-approved therapeutic drugs, that are in late stages of clinical testing.

Mr. Madden is recently retired as a Managing Director of Credit Suisse/Holt after a career in money management and investment research that included the founding of Callard Madden & Associates. During his career, he developed the cash-flow return on investment (CFROI) valuation framework that is widely used today by money management firms worldwide.

Continue reading “Bart Madden — Free To Choose Medicine — Better Drugs, Sooner, at Lower Costs — Saving Lives” »

NASA scientists and their colleagues are now proposing corporate financing for a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could one day go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the Red Planet.

The proposal suggests that companies could drum up $160 billion for a human mission to Mars and a colony there, rather than having governments fund such a mission with tax dollars.

Joel Levine, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, was quoted in a release in the Journal of Cosmology by Dr. Rhawn Joseph. The plan covers “every aspect of a journey to the Red Planet — the design of the spacecrafts, medical health and psychological issues, the establishment of a Mars base, colonization, and a revolutionary business proposal to overcome the major budgetary obstacles which have prevented the U.S. from sending astronauts to Mars,” said Levine.

Even fitness trackers ruled a big risk due to potential for record-matching identifying your family.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.K. and one in Saudi Arabia has developed a way to produce jet fuel using carbon dioxide as a main ingredient. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes their process and its efficiency.

As scientists continue to look for ways to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, they have increasingly focused on certain business sectors. One of those sectors is the aviation industry, which accounts for approximately 12% of transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions. Curbing carbon emissions in the aviation industry has proved to be challenging due to the difficulty of fitting heavy batteries inside of aircraft. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a chemical process that can be used to produce carbon-neutral jet fuel.

The researchers used a process called the organic combustion method to convert carbon dioxide in the air into jet fuel and other products. It involved using an iron catalyst (with added potassium and manganese) along with hydrogen, citric acid and carbon dioxide heated to 350 degrees C. The process forced the carbon atoms apart from the oxygen atoms in CO₂ molecules, which then bonded with hydrogen atoms, producing the kind of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise liquid jet fuel. The process also resulted in the creation of water molecules and other products.

Even Apple wants to get into the automobile business it seems.

(Reuters) — Apple Inc is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The iPhone maker’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019.

Continue reading “Exclusive: Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes ‘next level’ battery technology” »

New York has among the world’s tightest rules on fire safety and regular readers of this site will be aware that that has had a big impact on the ability to site lithium-ion based battery energy storage systems (BESS) within the boundaries of the state’s urban regions.

While the development of large-scale systems is taking place in less densely populated upstate areas of New York, commercial and industrial (C&I) battery storage, which has been used elsewhere around the country to help businesses manage their energy costs and the wider network to adopt greater shares of renewables, has not really been able to gain a foothold.

A couple of weeks ago the New York Power Authority (NYPA) — a public-benefit corporation which serves around 25% of the state’s electric load — began trialling an energy storage system using lithium batteries based around start-up Cadenza Innovation’s ’Supercell’ architecture. Wrapping individual cells into a protective housing, the technology is a low-cost way to prevent thermal runaway from cascading through a battery rack and causing fires.