Forty-six startups from around the world have been selected from a list of over 1000 applications to form the next cohort at Dubai Future Accelerators (DFA), it was revealed today.

Taking up their places for the nine-week program at the DFA’s headquarters in Emirates Towers, entrepreneurs with cutting-edge technologies will be partnering with various government-run entities, including Dubai Police, Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), Etisalat, Emirates, and more.

“In total, we have 150 entrepreneurs this round, 30 different nationalities from 14 countries. Small startups are working along big multinationals such as IBM, Nokia, and LG. And our oldest participant is 70 years old. This is a truly international and diverse program,” says Vera Futorjanski, communications head at Dubai Future Foundation.

Our very own Cerebral Fix and Skilitics have partnered and been selected as part of the cohort.

To find out more about the project, click here.

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com

My new band: Me + AI
Believe it or not, my first career choice was to be a pop musician. (Admittedly not a lot of demand for melodic punk-folk cross between The Pogues and Violent Femmes – we never got much further past our first self-published EP… 🙂 ).

The main challenges with any band are dealing with all the varying musical tastes, skills and, let’s face it, egos – yours truly included. This may all be a thing of the past thanks to developments in AI.

New AI startups such as Amper and Jukedeck are training their systems with hours of music recordings and scores to be able to produce professional sounding music (ok…muzak) in seconds using only a few inputs: eg beats per minute, rhythm, mood, and style. Meanwhile if you’re getting writer’s block, you can use AI tools like DeepBeat to generate song lyrics…

Here are a few early examples of what’s possible with HI+AI music production – the AI system appears to complement the musician by being able to replicate the progression, flow and tone of a modern pop song: which the artist then embellishes. Is this a whole new soundscape to be explored? …or will all music from now on converge into a mediocre average of what a neural net calculates “optimal” music should sound like?

How to build a world class AI capability (with a Facebook-sized budget, natch…)
I’m permanently immersed in reading about AI these days… in particular this HBR article Inside Facebook’s AI Workshop – an interview with Joaquin Candela, head of FB’s Applied Machine Learning (AML) group – stood out for me in the clear and relatable way it explains how FB have built their internal AI team by focusing on the business impacts at all times.

Mixed Augmented Realities
The big players have been busy:

• Google’s AR Experiments site features work by coders who are experimenting with augmented reality – some intriguing peaks into the future in here (plus the usual ephemera).
• Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for Augmented Reality is worth a read
• Magic Leap (remember them?) devices are expected to cost between US$1,500 and US$2,000, and set to ship “to a small group of users within six months.” . Apparently “It would be bigger than a pair of glasses, but smaller than virtual reality headsets such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift … Magic Leap’s device would require users to carry a puck-shaped device, around the size of a smartphone, that would wirelessly provide processing and information to the glasses.”

Liquid Election Time
September 23 is General Election day here in NZ – one of the closest fought campaigns ever known after new Labour leader Jacinda Ardern took over just 7 weeks ago. Watch this space, maybe there’ll be a new crowd in charge the day after…or maybe not.

While NZ benefits from an (imperfect) MMP proportional representation system which provides a high degree of stability and consensus to our politics (dull, even – but no Brexit or Trump votes going on here…) –  the whole parliamentary mechanism of how democracy is implemented seems increasingly archaic in modern times. Thus I was delighted to come across the concept of Liquid Democracy – “combining the advantages of Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy and creating a more democratic voting system that empowers voters to either vote on issues directly, or to delegate ones voting power to a trusted party.” It seems to make total sense now that new technologies exist to implement it at low cost  – NZ would be an ideal small country to test this system  – we should try it out.

Last minute CTO
Meanwhile in the last days of the General Election campaign, the National Party pivoted their position (partly in response to the recent NZ Tech Manifesto) with the announcement of the creation of a new national Chief Technology Officer role – not quite a “Ministry of the Future” but a step in the right direction, eh? Xero’s Rod Drury sums it up:

The Coming Kiwi Agribiz Armageddon and the Pollution Fallout
I’ve previously commented a number of times on the profound impacts of synthetic protein food investment on New Zealand’s heavily agricultural economy. Rosie Bosworth sums up much of the thinking in her article: Is New Zealand on the road to becoming the “Detroit of Agriculture?

In just the last few months:

• Meat giant Tyson Foods, Inc. launched a $150 million venture capital fund on sustainable food solutions, focusing on alternative proteins—that is, “meatless meats.”
• Memphis Meats’ Lab-Grown Meat Raises $17M Series A funding round
• Impossible Foods’s synthetic plant-based “meat” burgers are rolling out across restaurants in the US – using 5% of the land and 25% of the water that traditional meat production methods
• Sunfed Foods “Chicken-free Chicken” made from pea protein launches in NZ

I think we can all see how this plays out in ~10 years time…NZ primary sector prices collapse spectacularly in a matter of 1-3 years as industrial synthetic protein production takes off in-market overseas. This leaves disrupted Kiwi farmers desperately sucking the last drops of water out of the ground, pouring extra tonnes of nitrate on the land and antibiotics down animals throats in a fight for financial survival. Any concern for the environment or animal welfare will take second place. The whole house of cards topples as the banks call in debts on the hugely leveraged rural land underpinning most primary sector investment…NZ is left with a legacy of bankrupt farmers, depressed rural land prices and a polluted environment that will take decades to recover. How to avoid this, though? (Personally, I doubt that NZ can go “upmarket” to the high value niches – for one thing, virtually none of the upstream value chain assets are owned here…)

Perhaps the Netherlands, a small and crowded country, is currently number two global food producer in terms of value, shows us how it could be done. However the Dutch have the advantage of being right next to their market geographically.

Definitely one of the first matters on the desk of the new national CTO.

Life 3.0

Currently reading… Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence by cosmologist Max Tegmark, co-founder of the Future Of Life Institute. The book opens with a bang, outlining a near future scenario where a crack team of AI engineers bring about AGI and take over the world (for the “good”) – …but what then? Very thought provoking and accessible read.

RIP Cassini
Earlier this month – after nearly 20 years traveling hundreds of millions of miles and studying Saturn from every angle – the Cassini probe ended its mission by crashing directly into the surface of the planet. This accessible video outlines 10 Incredible Things We Learned From The Cassini Mission.
Perhaps one of the most profound aspects about the whole mission is the immortalisation of the 18th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini  who originally discovered Saturn’s satellites and the division of its rings – pretty cool to have your name on the first satellite to visit the planet >200 years after looking through that telescope… what discoveries are we making today that mean individual people’s names will live on that long?

EPIC is today the feature of bizEDGE NZ in light of the recent successes with the Champion Canterbury awards. Three EPIC tenants have been  announced as finalists in the awards and the spotlight is being turned to EPIC as a successful business hub.

Read the full story here.

This is the monthly update from Memia Labs; for more information about any of this, please contact them at labs@memia.com

The Coming Quantum Computing Revolution
My mind is still trying to absorb the full implications of this @a16z podcast on Quantum Computing.

In particular these lines jumped out at me:
– Nature is inherently quantum mechanical – computation becomes statistical, not boolean
– QUIL (Quantum Universal Instruction Language) solves the problem of how do you interface quantum computers with classical computers? Hybrid computers are needed.
– Evolution of processor units: Central Processing Unit (CPU) -> Graphics (GPU) -> Tensor (TPU) -> Quantum (QPU)
– “For a classical computer its power increases 2 to the power of n (no of transistors), but for a quantum computer it increases 2 to the power of q (no of qubits), which itself is 2 to the n. With the new technologies using silicon qubits, the number of qubits follows Moore’s law…” – Quantum computing power is following a hyper-exponential evolution – in a couple of years quantum computers could outperform any classical computer which has ever existed.

Amazing world we live in now where such world changing future technology insight is so accessible…in previous times this knowledge would have hidden in academic research labs and never seen the light of day…

VR Business
Back to (virtual) reality: VR appears to be hitting its stride in enterprise scenarios. There is a growing body of evidence that VR simulation delivers more effective training results (while also reducing hazards and costing far less) than more traditional methods. Industries as diverse as retail , automotive and healthcare are actively deploying VR solutions now within their operations.

AR Entertainment
Celebrated New Zealand film director Peter Jackson’s Wingnut AR studio released a table-top augmented reality demo created with Apple’s ARKit and Unreal Engine and running on an iPad. The demo will be developed into Wingnut’s first game. Eye opening as to the entertainment opportunities – and intriguing platform choice given that PJ has previously been publicly associated with AR hypesters Magic Leap. (Where are they?)

Watch the full 2-min demo here:

Ready Player One?

One of my favourite books ever Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is being made into a movie by Steven Spielberg (release date March 2018). Let’s hope that the film is true to the fun mythology of the book and doesn’t just turn into a procession of dull car chases like the trailer heralds….

There are signs that the imaginary massive multiplayer world of the book, OASIS, is taking its first steps towards reality: Japanese technology giant Softbank recently led a $502M investment round into UK-based startup Improbable.io,makers of SpatialOS and enablers of vast virtual and simulated worlds.

AI Policy
A highly useful resource released last month from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute AI researcher Miles Brundage on 80000Hours.org – Guide To Working In AI Policy and Strategy. Apparently there is a worldwide shortage of AI Policy analysts…get in quick. 🙂

AI Safety

AI Impacts surveyed 355 machine learning researchers on how good or bad they expect the results of ‘high-level machine intelligence’ to be for humanity: the results are shown below. The optimists outweigh the pessimists for now…just.

AI leader Andrew Ng thinks we should worry more about jobs than killer robots.

Meanwhile, the new film Supersapiens explores the question: As artificial intelligence rapidly blurs the boundaries between man and machine, are we witnessing the rise of a new human species?

SEC Rules on Cryptocurrencies
For the last few months I’ve been sharing my reading as I’ve ramped up my understanding of Cryptocurrencies. No more need, for Dan Romero from Coinbase has collated a definitive Cryptocurrency Reading List on Medium.

It’s the wild west out there…which has finally attracted the attentions of the SEC, who released guidance that DAO Tokens do count as securities and hence many of the ICOs carried out to date fall under SEC regulation. Andrew Simmonds from Simmonds Stewart lawyers outlines the main implications for anyone attempting an ICO from now on. If you’re a New Zealander, the extradition case of the infamous Kim Dotcom looms large in memory…

Incidentally, the very transparency of the Bitcoin blockchain has caused some regulators to remark somewhat humorously that they see Bitcoin trading as “Prosecution Futures“.

“The world is full of total jerkwads”
Fantastic 30-min interactive tutorial by the omnitalented Nicky Case on The Evolution of Trust – based on the principles of game theory. Absorbing.

Other bits and pieces we came across this month…
Boys and their toys  – General Atomics announced a new 10 Megajoule Railgun System capable of launching self-guiding projectiles at launch accelerations over 30,000 Gees.

True Random Number Generator Using Carbon Nanotubes – Hardware-based “true” random number generators are therefore considered the gold standard for security – researchers have built one from Carbon nanotubes, solving a problem for printed and flexible electronics.

100x Faster Blockchain – Microsoft’s new Coco blockchain framework can handle 1600 transactions per second with low hundreds of millisecond latency – they claim this is about 100 times better than other non-Coco protocols

Income Inequality continues to rise
This graph from the NY Times says it all. Meanwhile HBR reported earlier this year that income Inequality is rising between companies, not just individuals.

…But Is The World Really Better Than Ever?
Wonderful long essay from the Guardian exploring the world view of the New Optimists – arguably, by many factual measures, we are actually living in the best of times…and things keep getting better.

Measuring Gravitational Waves
Two very accessible videos from the NY Times and LIGO  explaining how the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has successfully managed to record the gravitational waves released by two distant black holes colliding trillions of years ago.

Quantum Thought
Finally…last month we linked to a recent Tim Ferriss podcast with Cryptocurrency visionary / polymath Nick Szabo. During the conversation (about 1hr 49min in) the term “Quantum Thought” comes up – this was a concept originally raised as a footnote on Nick’s incredible blog Unenumerated in 2012:

” Not only should you disagree with others, but you should disagree with yourself. …quantum thought, as I call it … demands that we simultaneously consider often mutually contradictory possibilities. Thinking about and presenting only one side’s arguments gives one’s thought and prose a false patina of consistency: a fallacy of thought and communications similar to false precision, but much more common and important. … In quantum reality, by contrast, I can be both for and against a proposition because I am entertaining at least two significantly possible but inconsistent hypotheses, or because I favor some parts of a set of ideas and not others. If you are unable or unwilling to think in such a quantum … manner, it is much less likely that your thoughts are worthy of others’ consideration. “

Beautifully put.

More again next month – Comments, feedback, suggestions? Email labs@memia.com/

As Apple looks to move into it’s new Apple Park in California, employees are upset over the move to rid the company of offices, and instead introduce open plan workspaces.

It’s the latest trend in productivity with its supporters and its haters. With a large majorty of EPIC being setup as open plan workspaces, do you think this works? Is it just a case of personal preference?

Here’s a good article that looks at the pros and the cons.

All across the country you can find success stories of co-working where otherwise struggling businesses are finding their feet and reaching new levels of success. EPIC itself is a great facilitator of growth for many local businesses.

Natalie Sissons discusses how co-working is helping businesses in Upper Hutt. Read her story here.

Working alongside other companies’ employees in an open office may sound like a recipe for distraction for some, but for many small start-ups, freelancers and small companies it can be surprisingly beneficial.

“A business can come in, set up their laptop and start going. We have really streamlined processes so people can focus on their work,” says founder of EPIC Westport, Natasha Barnes Dellaca. She believes shared working spaces are for everyone.

Learn how the businesses involved in EPIC Westport’s co-working hub are thriving from the collaborative atmosphere. Read the full article here.

Banqer, Christchurch based startup designed to teach Kiwi kids financial literacy is making its big next step into Australia. Setting up a Sydney base, the company hopes to make a mark in the financial wellbeing of Australian children.

This is just one of many Christchurch based companies who are growing and achieving success in other markets. We have a wealth of talent in the city throughout startup, growth and established organisations.

To find out more about Banqer and their move abroad, read the full article here.