January
CES2023: Enterprise tech takes centre stage/ Last mile startups deliver the goods. With Christmas over, the decorations packed away, it was time to catch the plane to Vegas to see what happening in the world of consumer electronics at CES. The answer, it turned out, was lots of enterprise use cases in IoT, digital twins, 5G, edge computing and AI. As the show’s VP of research Steve Koenig explained, “enterprise technology is leading the way in helping the world solve some of its greatest challenges.”
Another interesting CES trend was the amount of last mile delivery startups working on bots that the like of Amazon and DHL were starting to discontinue. Bearing in mind that these innovations were unveiled in the early days of genAIs such as Bard and ChatGPT, it will be interesting to see what additional features they will have on offer next month at the 2024 event.
UK and US schools fall victim to major cyber attack. As pupils headed back to their desks after the winter break, it emerged several schools across the UK and US were subject to a string of cyber attacks. It’s a pattern that would repeat itself throughout 2023, with education facilities proving soft targets for attackers due to the sensitive information they possess as well as the large numbers of people accessing their systems and networks, often remotely and from numerous devices.
Britain’s EV battery dream tanks as Britishvolt collapses. While the UK government laid down its ambitions to become a ‘tech superpower’ at every possible opportunity this year, in the manufacturing space at least, this faces challenges. Britishvolt, a proposed ‘gigafactory’ in the north of England, which aimed to supply the EV market with home-grown batteries and create over 8,000 jobs, filed for administration after failing to secure funding, blaming difficult economic circumstances. A monthly later (Feb 7) Recharge Industries was selected as the planned factory’s preferred buyer. However, by July administrator EY said that the Aussie firm still hadn’t paid the remaining £2.5m. By October a deal was said to be ‘close’ according to a BBC report, which added that, if it went ahead, the batteries produced in Blyth would be primarily used to supply the Australian military.
Microsoft pours billions into OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This year was undoubtedly the year that generative AI impacted both the enterprise and consumer markets. Even your mum has probably heard about the merits of the AI-powered large language model ChatGPT. Microsoft, having already poured millions into the chatbot’s maker Open AI, sensed that it was on to a good thing and decided to double down on its initial investment, adding a further $10b to the Silicon Valley start up’s coffers.
Biggest moment of Q1
How can we prevent gender bias in next gen chatbots? By March the large-language-models at scale war was hotting up between Open AI’s ChatGPT its new rival chatbot from Google, in the form of Bard. Both were proving remarkable in terms of their understanding of the word, but only based on what they were learning from information scraped off the internet, much of which, as any human being could tell you, comes with a host pre-existing bias.
In the race to own the gateways to web 3.0, how can we ensure that we’re not hard coding injustices and prejudices from the previous version?
This year’s International Women’s Day on 9 March felt like a good moment to take stock on some of these issues, as TI interviewed key figures in the field, including Ivana Bartoletti, data privacy officer at Wipro and The Alliance for Universal Digital Rights campaigner Emma Gibson.
February
UK’s Tech Nation to close after government axes funding. After 12 years of lending support to around 40 of the UK’s tech unicorns, start up network Tech Nation announced that it would close its doors in March, after the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport gave its allotted £12m of grant funding, which Tech Nation had relied on, to Barclays Bank. The move sparked concerns of a monopoly with Barclays now able to have first dibs on an array of start up and fin tech talent. More than 400 entrepreneurs sign an open letter decrying the move.
What is driving the big tech job cuts? From Alphabet to Salesforce, tech companies were starting to feel the freeze as a total of around 58,000 big tech jobs were cut in in January — a month on, we took a deeper dive into what caused the latest round of lay offs and asked whether major tech companies can bounce back…
Google tunes into AI chatbot Bard. Generative AI wars ramped up in February as Google unveiled its own chatbot Bard in a blogpost from CEO Sundar Pichai. Only a few days later however, things went pear shaped when an advert designed to show off its new AI bot, showed it answering a query incorrectly. Shares in parent company Alphabet sank by more than 7%, knocking $100bn (£82bn) off the firm’s market value.
Diving into the industrial metaverse. Meta and other tech and gaming giants may have spent the year struggling to inspire users with their consumer visions of the metaverse, many of which seem to have become inextricably (if unfairly) linked to the fortunes of crypto and NFTs, but the industrial metaverse fared better, demonstrating actual use cases.
The industrial metaverse is really a byword for companies that create open platforms for enterprises that enable third parties to collaborate and build digital twins and connected devices that talk to each other. Siemens unveiled some interesting examples this year, including one from underwater farmers, Nemo’s Garden, which was able to design and monitor its underwater greenhouse via the vendor’s digital twin.
Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
The Jimmy Wales interview. At Open:UK’s inaugural conference this year the Wikipedia founder spoke exclusively with TechInformed about his issues with the UK’s oft-bashed Online Safety Bill (which became law in October) and the encyclopaedia site’s systemic gender bias.
One year on: 10 Technologies used in the war in Ukraine. From emergency connectivity to Drones, VR and AI, to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, TI investigates the role tech has played and the ten key technologies that have been used.
Mobile operators open to API developers. One of the biggest stories to come out of annual telecom fest Mobile World Congress this year was the news that mobile operators would open their networks to third party developers. The GSMA’s announcement saw 21 carriers come together to launch a framework for a set of eight ‘universal’ APIs so that third party developers could access and use a variety of mobile network services like location or identity verification and carrier billing, in a simpler, more cost-effective way.
March
Samsung and Amazon named biggest polluters in big tech. Electronics Hub names Samsung and Amazon the biggest carbon polluters among large tech companies. The study used publicly available ESG and CSR reports, looking at the total direct and indirect carbon emission figures for 100 of the largest technology companies, ranking them from highest to lowest polluting within the industry.
UK parliament probes use of AI-powered weapons. The House of Lords launched a call for evidence on AI-powered autonomous weapons, looking at the ethics of these systems and whether they risk escalating wars more quickly as well as their compliance with international law.
HSBC steps in to buy UK arm of SVB. As the US’s Silicon Valley Bank collapsed within 48 hours, sparked by a mass draw down, the British government intervened to find a buyer for the UK arm. Following a series of all-night talks over the space of one weekend, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Bank of England, HSBC was selected (perhaps due to its strength and size) – handing over one symbolic pound to acquire the business.
IBM quantum computing
Meet the real digital nomads. A report on how a former senior Infosys exec, Mohamed Anis decided to make it his mission to apply the IT giant’s outsourcing model to reskill thousands of refugees so that they could work as remote digital marketing managers. Anis was inspired by speech given by Mohammed Hassan, the ambassador for refugee rights at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019. He has since onboarded over 1000 refugees across seven camps, giving them daily Zoom lessons to sharpen their tech skills, including thousands of hours on GPT.
11 tools to help reduce your firm’s carbon footprint. What tools and tech are readily available on the market that can help manage your firm’s digital footprint? In this two-part series TI listed eleven solutions, including carbon calculators, sensors, green APIs and digital twins.
Toyota updates crash test simulation for automated driving. In a sign indicating level 5 of vehicle autonomy is on its way, automaker Toyota added a series of new features to its long-established crash test simulation software to take account of the changes in people’s postures while travelling in automated vehicles. The new software update, Total Human Model for Safety (THUMS), claims to come with improved modelling for men, women and children and has been designed to give a more accurate prediction of what will happen in a crash.
Preparing networks for quantum safety. While quantum computing is still in its nascent stages, many believe that by 2032, a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of running crypto-analytic algorithms will threaten to break the security of the internet and mobile networks. Zygmunt Lozinski, IBM’s post quantum telco network industry technical lead told TI what steps the sector needed to take to ensure quantum safety.
Writer’s Pick of 2023
Everything you need to know about quantum computing. Thanks in part to the burgeoning number of academic spinouts in this year, the increased interested from public and private funders and the fact that enterprises need to start thinking about how to protect their encrypted data, it feels as though quantum computing is about to have its moment. So, when IBM invited TechInformed to its London HQ over the summer to take a closer look at one of its decommissioned quantum computers, we leapt the chance.
Distinguished engineer and quantum ambassador Richard Hopkins was on hand to give us the tour and explain the difference between qubits and gates and quantum computers vs supercomputers.
IBM’s quantum offering – which is available in the cloud for pretty much anyone to have a go with – can help with anything that requires complex decision making or simulations. Yes, there are other tools and technologies that can do this but use case generation and the relatively low barrier to entry should see a notable uptake of this tech in 2024.
