Quick Overview
- COMPUTE: US kick-bans Huawei, shoots its own companies in the foot while doing so
- CRYPTO: When KYC isn’t enough, why not impose square rules for all the round plugs?
- ENERGY: GE boasts the specs of it’s new, insane, huge ass 12 MW wind turbine
- NANOTECH: Brain Computer Interfaces move a step closer with “dust” sized sensors
- TRANSPORT: Boring Company receives approval for $50 million LA Loop
We believe that everyone’s future can be richer, happier and more efficient, but you can’t embrace that future unless you take the first most crucial step, being informed of it.
Welcome to The Tipping Point, news from the most critical future industries curated for you every week so you can stay informed and prepared. No need to waste hours everyday researching, stay on top of it all with one post and then get back to doing what you do best.
The Tipping point is named after the point at which a new technology goes from being disappointing, expensive and buggy to exciting, exponential, cheap and mainstream. This point of change often sneaks up on and surprises everyone including industry experts!
No matter if you’re personally employed in the industry or just a lurker, The Tipping Point is vital to staying up to date and being ready to transition smoothly rather than getting caught off guard.
This Weeks News!
COMPUTE: US kick-bans Huawei, shoots its own companies in the foot while doing so
While the phrase “it’s Huawei or the highway” might sound fund to say, it looks like America is dictating they go down a different path. This is because the American Department of Commerce has added Chinese manufacturer Huawei to its ‘Entity List,’ which essentially means no US company can do business with them anymore. While there is currently a 90 day window where US companies can still do business with them it’s anyone’s guess what happens after or before that time is up.
Now while it’s true that it will be extremely tough for Huawei to continue to make phones, laptops and so on without any US companies doing business with them such as Intel, Google, Microsoft etc, it’s also true that Huawei is a huge company. As such all those US companies will miss out on licensing fees or direct hardware sales taking away a large chunk of their profits. Furthermore it’s looking very likely that Huawei will now proceed to essentially go their own way and build all their products with as little or even no US input as possible. This is looking like it will fracture the iOS / Android mobile OS dominance over time and introduce one or more other operating systems produced by Chinese companies.
This could potentially be a good thing as it may bring more competition to the market… or it could be horrible as it could mean yet more development costs for everyone to build another “app version”. It could also mean the talent and focus of developers is spread thinner thus leading to slower development of technologies in the future not to mention worse UX for customers with even more OS’s to choose from and learn or swap between. It’ll be interesting to watch it all play out as the world is heavily, heavily interconnected now, so when one big company or country falls, every company/country feels it.
CRYPTO: When KYC isn’t enough, why not impose square rules for all the round plugs?
In what can only be described as old finance regulators trying to shoehorn old finance regulations onto new crypto technologies the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is going to finalise new international standards for regulating crypto firms next month. The new standards do indeed make sense for more traditional systems like bank wire transfers but seem trivially useless when applied to even the most basic crypto transactions.
At its heart the task force wants exchanges and other firms to keep logs of who is sending crypto and who it is going to, a job that while sounding logical… is impossible to accomplish given crytocurrencies like Bitcoin’s design. Check out the link for more details on what’s expected but it’s difficult to see how any exchanges or other crypto firms will even remotely begin to comply with rules like this.
ENERGY: GE boasts the specs of it’s new, insane, huge ass 12 MW wind turbine
This great piece by Vox goes into detail about the new GE Haliade-X wind turbine. Weighing in at a completely insane 12 MW, this huge ass ocean wind turbine can generate 67 GWh annually. How much is that in normal person speak? Well 12 MW is the same as having 2,400 5 kW solar systems. In GE’s own words:
One Haliade-X 12 MW can generate enough clean power to supply 16,000 European households according to wind conditions on a typical German North Sea site.
While the fact that it’s only about 20% shorter than the Eiffel Tower is kind of insane, its size and height translate not only into more power produced, but producing power more often too. In fact it should be able to produce power around 63% of the time which means less money and time needs to be spent on pairing it with other power sources further reducing costs. For now it’s the biggest wind turbine in the world at least until the researchers at the University of Virginia finish off their design for 1,640 foot tall one which is almost double the height of the Haliade-X.
NANOTECH: Brain Computer Interfaces move a step closer with “dust” sized sensors
While traditional neural sensors (those things people stick into their brains to detect neural activity for various reasons) have been relatively big and bulky, Brown University neuroengineering professor Arto Nurmikko has now created ones that are not only much smaller, but wireless too. Coming in at 0.25-square-millimeters, they partnered with Qualcomm to develop and build them.
As if that size wasn’t impressive enough, they even have a very high bandwidth of 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up too! It’s hoped that this will be only the beginning of creating better and smaller brain computer interfaces (BCIs) to not only help disabled people but make interacting with technology better too.
TRANSPORT: Boring Company receives approval for $50 million LA Loop
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has granted approval for The Boring Company to build their proposed Loop system over the next year. This project looks to be quite simple relatively speaking and should hopefully make a fantastic working proof for more expensive and complex designs later on if successful.
While the LVCVA doesn’t need the Loop to be completed before 2021, Elon has already gone on Twitter to say that they’re aiming to have it finished by the end of 2019. He’s likely only talking about the actual tunnel part itself though not all the stations, entrances, exits etc etc. Check out the link for more details on what it’s going to look like and where the 3 new underground stations are likely to be.
And that’s it for this week! Let us know in the comments what you think or if you have found any other important news!
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