Finding Merging Galaxies, Satellite Internet and Earbuds

January 16

How, amongst the billions of galaxies in the night sky, can we pick which 2 are merging and what can we learn from that merger? This sounds like a job for AI. We also look at the various Satellite Internet proposals, Earbuds that take your blood pressure, an NBA star turning his contract into digital tokens and we ask if there are too many LiDAR companies.

NBA star turns his contract into Digital Tokens

Most of us have heard of Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies. These currencies use Blockchain to record the ownership of each coin and the sale and purchase of those coins. Each coin is known as a “Token”. Brooklyn Nets’ point guard, Spencer Dinwiddie, is looking to be the first professional athlete to “tokenise” his contract.

Dinwiddie has a 3 year, US$34.36 Million contract. He hopes to be able to collect some of the value of the contract up front by selling tokens to investors. Each of the 90 tokens will be worth $150,000 and the token will pay an interest rate of 4.95% on a monthly basis. The token will be fully paid out in 2023. Why would he do this? He obviously believes that he can produce a return greater than the cost of the interest (i.e. 4.95%). It is why any of us borrows money to invest.

Whilst the use of Blockchain for this purpose is new, he is not the first performer to monetize future earnings in this way. Older readers might remember that in 1997, David Bowie released his Bowie Bonds. He raised US$55Million by promising investors, future income from his back catalogue of 25 albums (all recorded prior to 1990). Bowie used the proceeds to purchase back old recordings from his previous manager (many young artists in the 60’s, including the Beatles, were ripped off by managers and others by convincing them to sign away ownership of their work for paltry sums). If effect Bowie surrendered the royalties from the recordings for the life of the bond however he recovered ownership and future royalties after the bond was repaid (the bond had a 7.9% coupon and a 10 year maturity).

Satellite Internet connections

SpaceX (one of Elon Musk’s companies) has applied for permission to launch 42,000 satellites as part of its’ Starlink project which is designed to provide high speed internet around the world. Amazon’s project Kuiper wants to launch 3,236 satellites to provide a similar service. There are currently approximately 5,000 satellites in orbit. Such a large increase in the number of satellites will impact astronomers and their work (and they are already complaining).

Cornell University may have discovered a means to provide a similar service but with only 4 satellites. The team developed a design to cover 86% of the world over a 24-hour period. These 4 satellites would float at a much higher elevation to achieve the greater coverage. Starlink is designed to operate at low altitude (550 kilometers) in order to reduce latency of the internet coverage. The new design won’t replace traditional internet coverage in the developed world however it does open up full Earth coverage to more people at lower cost.

Colliding Galaxies

Whilst we are talking about space, recently an AI program was designed to identify galaxies that are in the process of colliding in space. The Universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies and human examination of them is very time consuming and tedious.

AI is perfect for this type of work. AI can look at tons and tons of data, 24 hours a day and find exactly what you asked it to look for and nothing else. A group of Astronomers, lead by Lingyu Wang in the Netherlands, used an AI program to examine over 200,000 galaxies to identify any that are in the process of merging.

One of the pressing questions in Astronomy is how and when stars form. A popular theory is that merging galaxies produce shock waves in the interstellar gas cloud thus creating a significant baby boom in stars. The researchers were able to confirm this theory by the examination of the merging galaxies found by the AI, which otherwise would have been extremely difficult to find.

Too many LiDAR companies?

Last week we highlighted a few new developments in LiDAR which have made the technology cheaper and lighter. There are tons of LiDAR companies out there, each with its’ promise of better vision for cars of the future. Funding for these companies in recent years was thick and fast however it appears that we have now reached the start of the shakeout. Every new technology goes through a cycle of development. The Gartner Hype Cycle is often used to describe this cycle (see here if you want to know more).

LiDAR is no different. The first LiDAR like system was invented in 1961. The word was first used in 1963. LiDAR was initially used for meteorology. In 1971 during Apollo 15’s mission to the moon it was used as an altimeter to map the surface of the moon. In 2017, Intel bought an Israeli pioneer in this space, Mobileye (founded in 1999) for US$15.3Billion. As a comparison, Tesla has just passed Ford as the most valuable car company with a market cap just over US$80Billion.

Like most high risk investments at the early stages of development, out of 10 companies, 3 or 4 will fold, four or five will be bought for modest sums and the remainder will produce a more impressive return.

There will however be room for a range of different types of LiDAR. Self driving cars are not the only potential market. We have previously talked about fruit picking technologies and mobile robots all of which use some sort of artificial perception system to navigate.

Blood Pressure sensing Earbuds

There are a wide range of wearable technologies that measure things like heart rate, breathing, gait and other physical attributes however one important health measurement that has thus far eluded easy measurement is Blood Pressure. Last year Omron released an inflatable-cuff blood pressure watch. This watch allows a manual reading of blood pressure whenever and wherever you wish (an automatic version is undergoing FDA approval at the moment). The watch is however bulky and uncomfortable to wear.

Valencell has an alternative that might be more comfortable. They are the company that makes many of the optical heart-rate sensors that use photoplethysmography to check your pulse on your watch, phone etc. They are now adapting that technology to measure blood pressure via your earbuds. The ears are a great location for blood pressure measurement as there is a strong blood flow. You need to stay still during the reading however a near continuous flow of data can be read via the associated app. This allows a continuous measurement of blood pressure that a standard cuff is not able to provide. Changes in blood pressure in different situations can be medically significant in determining treatment.

The product is a general wellness product that can be used for screening, it is not yet medical grade equipment. Evaluation prototypes are being released to product manufacturers in February and consumer products might arrive later in 2020.

Paying it Forward

If you have a start-up or know of a start-up that has a product ready for market please let me know. I would be happy to have a look and feature the startup in this newsletter. Also if any startups need introductions please get in touch and I will help where I can.

If you have any questions or comments please email me via my website craigcarlyon.com

I would also appreciate it if you could forward this newsletter to anyone that you think might be interested. 

Till next week.