Lifeboat Foundation

The new digital communications policy (NDCP) 2018, approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday, looks too good to believe. It has promised to create an additional four million jobs in five years and reskill another one million people in new-age skills and sectors such as 5G LTE and artificial intelligence. Six lakh villages will be connected which will eventually lead to creating jobs and several earning avenues such as managing WiFi hotspots and laying optical fibre, among others. The policy will give an impetus to the job market.

NDCP is bound to create a massive infrastructure and help the debt-ridden telecom sector emerge from its current turbulence. The policy document envisages the reduction in levies and ease of doing business, and this will help restore the financial health of the long-bleeding sector. The focus will be on the proliferation of telecom services and facilitating low-cost financing. The government’s ambitious plan of Digital India will get a booster shot. Thanks to the promise of 50 Mbps speed in the broadband connection, the consumer will be the ultimate beneficiary.

Plans are afoot to reform the licensing and regulatory regime to facilitate investments and innovation, besides promoting ease of doing business. The success of the policy will depend on the execution of the policy.

Continue reading “DNA Money Edit: Telecom sector awaits a turnaround” »

The Disruption Experience this Friday in Singapore is a blockchain event with a difference. With apologies to the Buick commercial, this is not your grandfather’s conference…

I know a few things about blockchain conferences. I produced and hosted the first Bitcoin Event in New York. My organization develops cryptocurrency standards and practices. We help banks and governments create policy and services. And as public speaker for a standards organization, I have delivered keynote presentations at conferences and Expos in Dubai, Gujarat India, Montreal and Tampa, New York and Boston.

Continue reading “Disruption Experience Nails It” »

Surging productivity and the general rise in incomes it brings would be welcome, of course, but that isn’t sufficient. The same questions being raised about the advance of robotics in the workplace apply to machine learning. While new jobs would be created, many existing jobs — from doctors and financial advisers to translators and call-center operators — are susceptible to displacement or much-reduced roles. No economic law guarantees that productivity growth benefits everyone equally. Unless we thoughtfully manage the transition, some people, even a majority, are vulnerable to being left behind even as others reap billions.

Whether it’s for the better and for the many is up to human intelligence.

Lucid Motors, the electric car startup that aims to compete with Tesla, will receive an eye-popping $1 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the kingdom announced on Monday. The investment will finance Lucid Motor’s 2020 commercial launch of its first electric vehicle, the Lucid Air. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock dipped by as much as 2 percent in early trading on news of the investment.

The deal is a major win for Lucid, which has languished over the last year as it failed to secure the funding necessary to start making its luxury electric cars. News of the talks comes weeks after Saudi Arabia purchased 5 percent of Tesla and emerged as a central player in Elon Musk’s failed effort to take the company private again. Musk cited conversations with the director of the Saudi fund as the impetus for his push to take Tesla private.

90% of natural disasters are flood related. Flooding will occur and people will build in areas that can and will flood so how can we change the outcomes in the future? Why not have floating homes that are anchored to their site but rise and lower with the flood with zero damage? I am about to start a new company that can manufacture those homes. If you want to know more contact me directly.

Engineers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have developed a new statistical model that predicts how likely extreme flood events are in Germany. In contrast to earlier models, they distinguish between several types of floods with different causes, such as heavy rain, snow or spatially extended rain events with long durations. The model improves the assessment of flood risks and to plan appropriate protective measures. The team led by Professor Andreas Schumann from the Institute of Hydrology, Water Resources Management and Environmental Engineering reports on its work in the Bochum science magazine Rubin.

In their model, the hydrologists distinguish between three main types of flood, which stem from different causes: heavy rain, which lasts one or two days; prolonged rain over four to five days; and snow-related flooding.

Continue reading “Predicting flood risk better” »

When we think of robots manipulating objects, we tend to think of endless banks of robot arms in some high-tech assembly line, dancing their mechanical dance in perfect synchronization. They grab an object, turn it round a bit, and put it down again, before repeating the action with an identical object time and again. But what if a robot could look at any item, and decide how best to pick it up, and perform tasks with it, all by itself? That’s the aim of DON – a new neural network and robotic hand at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

WASHINGTON — A startup company planning to develop orbital propellant depots to assist satellite servicing ventures has raised an initial round of funding to support a first launch as soon as next year.

Orbit Fab, a Silicon Valley-based company with about a dozen employees, said Aug. 28 that a round of funding led by venture capital firm Bolt will enable it to demonstrate technology for fuel tanks that could be used by future satellite servicing systems.

“We differentiate ourselves from the satellite servicing operators in that we’re looking to put up just dumb tanks full of propellant, to provide that propellant where it’s needed, and we’re looking to partner with the satellite servicing operators to help improve their business models,” said Daniel Faber, chief executive of Orbit Fab, in an interview.

Continue reading “Startup plans ‘gas stations’ for satellite servicing” »

The space industry is dominated by private companies, but one of the biggest banks on Wall Street is telling clients to pay attention to coming investment opportunities.

T-Mobile disclosed an “incident” in which hackers accessed “some” customers’ personal information—but no financial data or passwords.