Music, Mayflower and Marketplaces

October 24

This week I will highlight two of the startups that presented at the CRIISP showcase day last week in Sydney. Both are in the music industry. I will also talk about a few recent developments in computing, an AI driven boat, how to power all those IOT devices and cooperating robots. Finally there is now an online bookstore that sells AI written books.

Emanate

One of the biggest problems for musicians that create music, is getting paid by the commercial users of their music. One of the founders of Emanate.live wrote a song that was used in the movie “Magic Mike”. It took him 2 years to get paid. For most musicians this is an untenable situation. Emanate uses a blockchain (EOS.IO) based smart contract that ensures that commercial users pay the musician immediately upon use of the music. To use the system both the commercial user and the artist agree to a smart contract that is held on the blockchain (I will explain blockchains in more detail in a future newsletter, for now just think of it as a public database that can’t be altered). Once the music is used, the contract is executed and payments are made in realtime. If there are 2 or more creators, payments can be automatically distributed as per the smart contract. This type of smart contract will be used more widely in a range of creative industries in the future.

GiggedIn

One of the issues for concert and festival promoters is that not all concerts sell out. This is bad for the artist and a half full venue is not good for the experience. GiggedIn tries to remedy this situation with a subscription model where subscribers can use their subscription to pay for tickets to various events. All tickets are sold at recommended retail or less and all tickets come from the promoter (they are not resold tickets or scalped tickets). For sold out shows there is a waitlist. If a subscriber cancels their ticket, the next on the waitlist can purchase the ticket at the original price (no markup). A monthly subscription buys you credits which can be rolled over to future months without expiring. Credits are used to buy tickets. If you don’t have enough credits, you can top up with cash. It is a great way to discover new bands at an attractive price and to obtain tickets to more popular events.

Cobots

Doosan Robotics from Korea have just released their range of Cobots. Cobots are Robots that cooperate and work together to complete their tasks. Tasks such as assembly of complex equipment which requires many varied operations to be completed. I think that somebody might have made a movie about what happens when the robots start cooperating?

Exascale Computing

Whilst true Quantum Computers are still a few years away, Exascale Computing will be here very shortly. Exascale Computing is a computer that can perform a minimum of 1 Exaflop per second. A Flop is a Floating Point Operation or calculation (a standard measure of computer speed). An Exaflop is 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 Flops per second (or if you like a Quintillion Flops per second). This is the same as the current 500 fastest computers in the world combined.

October 18 has been designated the first annual Exascale Day (i.e. an exaflop is 10 to the power of 18, using the US date nomenclature, 10-18 or October 18). Exascale computing will bring advances in personalized medicine, manufacturing, space, nuclear and climate research. More computing speed allows more testing and calculation in a shorter timeframe. Intel and Cray should deliver Aurora, the first exaflop computer in 2021. China is not far behind. Europe, Japan and India are also working on similar projects. This video will give you a deeper explanation.

The Mayflower sails again

The historically minded amongst you will remember that the Mayflower was the boat that the Pilgrims used to sail to America. The original ship set out in 1620. A fully automated AI driven ship will retrace the journey on the 400th anniversary. This time there will be no passengers or crew however the ship will carry out a range of scientific experiments along the journey.

Using Ambient Microwaves to power IOT devices

The Internet of Things (IOT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Examples that exist today are smart watches, fitbits and other tracking devices. In the next few years IOT devices will be everywhere. Already shirts that measure your heart rate and a range of other physical indicators have been developed.

One problem though is how to power all these new devices. Do we plug our shirts in next to our phones overnight? Japanese researchers may have come up with a solution for smaller IOT devices that require only a little power. The “Nanowire Backward Diode” is a device that harvests ambient microwaves that are in the atmosphere and turns them into electricity. This diagram shows basically how it works. The technically minded might like to read more here.

The solution will only work in areas with background radio waves and for devices that require very little power. Research is still continuing. The team aims to create technologies that convert the unused and minute energy from heat, light, vibrations, radio waves, and living organisms existent in various environments into electricity.

An online Marketplace for AI written novels

It had to happen. AI is writing more and more so Booksby.ai established an online bookshop purely for AI written books. If you have a look at the previews of some of the books you will see that the AI is not yet writing flowing prose. However we know how quickly this area is progressing. It won’t be long before you can get an AI to write the novel that you always wanted to read. Maybe you will be the hero of the story

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 give the start-up a shout out to my readers if it is something that I think they could use. 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.