Smart Toilets, NFTs and Animating Family Photos
March 4
This week we will look at a new Japanese Smart Toilet that will provide health and diet advice. We also investigate Non Fungible Tokens and Fractional Ownership. Finally we examine an AI that tried to write love notes for Love Heart Candies and animation of family photos.
Smart Toilet
The Japanese have long been known for their advanced toilet technology. The latest in a line of developments is a toilet being developed by Toto. This new concept toilet will analyze your daily waste to look for a variety of disease markers. The toilet will also use technology to provide lifestyle and diet tips based upon the waste analysis.
The new high tech toilet will not involve any unpleasant sample collection. It will work as a normal toilet does however if anything unusual is detected it will send a message to your phone.
When you sit down a range of sensors embedded in the seat will be activated. Information such as blood flow, heartbeat and skin condition can be analyzed. A weak electric current can measure visceral fat and skeletal muscle levels. Sensors will check the stool and urine for color, odor, consistency and other markers. AI that analyses urine for various cancers (see our January story re Prostate Cancer) will also provide continuous feedback which allows problems to be detected much earlier than an annual checkup.
This new toilet is very much still under development however it is another step forward in improving our overall health and wellbeing in a non invasive way.
Non Fungible Tokens
Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have been around for a few years however it is only in the past few weeks or months that they have exploded in popularity. So what is an NFT and why would I need one?
Fungible essentially means interchangeable. For example, if you and I had $10 notes and we swapped them they would keep the same value and the same efficacy. Non fungible assets are unique and not directly interchangeable. We still might swap non fungible assets e.g. I might have a painting of my dog and I could swap that for an old pair of tennis shoes but that exchange would be based upon our perception of the relative value of each asset, the assets are not directly interchangeable.
Tokens on the internet are cryptographic strings of numbers and letters that relate back to real data. For an NFT that data might be a photo of the painting of my dog. That token is unique and only relates to that particular photo of my dog painting. No two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be collected, sold or swapped.
So what is an NFT on the internet and why has their use exploded. It is easiest to use an example. In October 2017, Dapper Labs released Cryptokitties. It is a collectible that only exists on the internet. You could breed and adopt (i.e. buy) Kitties of all shapes and colors. The more unique the shape or color the more popular and thus the more valuable (at least in collectors eyes). The record price paid for a Cryptokittie was US$170,000.
Each NFT is housed on a blockchain (I will explain blockchain another day but for now just consider it as a big ledger containing all the buying and selling transactions and ownership of the kitties). Cryptokitties is housed on the Etherium Blockchain.
Fast forward a few years and there are now a wide range of sites that trade NFT’s of various types. The most popular at the moment is NBA Top Shot. This is another Dapper Labs product which was launched in October 2020. To date they have sold over $250,000,000 in Moments (their name for the NFTs). Collectors buy a pack of Moments and when they open the pack they find out what exact Moments they have collected (in a similar way to baseball trading cards). Each Moment is a few seconds of video of a particular play in an NBA game, shown from multiple angles.
Basic packs, with 3 common Moments cost US$9 and rare packs with 1 rare and 5 common Moments cost US$99. There are higher levels of packs costing up to US$1,000. Each NFT is unique however there are multiple copies of each Moment (each numbered, lower numbers are considered more valuable and the moment number corresponding to the player’s jersey number is usually the most valuable). Some Moments are rare i.e. only 50 copies, others are common e.g. 15,000 copies. Some Moments are worth more than others. The record price paid so far is US$208,000 for an ultra rare LeBron James dunk Moment. There is a marketplace where you can buy and resell moments. Here is a sample of current offerings.
Last weekend (end February 2021) over 200,000 people were online at the same time trying to buy one of 5,000 rare packs for US$99. Yes I was one of them and no I didn’t snag a pack. I was successful in buying a basic pack a couple of days later. I will let you know what Moments I received.
There are now multiple sites where you can buy and sell all sorts of NFTs. On Rarible artists can create works of art, simply upload them and sell digital versions of their art. If their painting becomes really popular they not only benefit from the original sale price, they also can receive a commission (usually 10%) of each subsequent resale. Opensea claims to be the largest NFT marketplace. You can buy and sell domain names, crypto trees, art, virtual worlds, trading cards and other collectibles. Mintable allows you to create and trade art. Sorare is a European Digital Football Card trading site. You can also collect cards to form teams and play in fantasy football competitions.
Fractional Ownership
There is also a growing movement online to part own rare assets. For example Rally is a platform that allows you to buy equity shares in assets such as:
First edition of Sir Issac Newton’s The Principia (valued at US$300,000, each share is likely to cost about US$30 when it is released for sale),
Signed copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (valued at US$98,000, 4,900 shares at US$20 each),
95 Ferrari F355 Spider (valued at US$120,000, not yet released for sale),
85 Ferrari Testarossa (originally valued at US$165,000 @US$82.50per share, shares now trading at US$100 per share valuing the car at US$200,000)
There are also watches, comic books (a 1960 DC Comics Justice League of America #1 was valued at US$215,000), wine, handbags and trading cards (a Wayne Gretzky rookie card was recently valued at US$800,000). The assets are managed and stored at Rally’s headquarters on behalf of the owners. Once the initial offering of shares has been completed the shares can be traded via Rally approved brokers. Currently only US based investors can use Rally.
Australian startup, Bricklet enables fractional ownership of Australian Residential Property. Bricklets start from A$20,000 (price varies by property) and each Bricklet is tradable independent of the other owners. Approved managers manage the property on behalf of the owners. There are multiple US based fractional ownership managers for shares listed on the stock market. Masterworks is a fractional ownership platform for the blue chip art market. Collectable is a US app for fractional ownership of sports memorabilia.
Please note that none of this is Financial Advice. Please do your research before signing up or investing in anything.
AI created Love Heart Candy
We have examined a lot of ways where AI can be of great assistance. There are however lots of way where AI still has a lot to learn. I am sure that many of you ate some Love Heart Candy when you were growing up. They had messages such as “I love you”, “True love” “Love 2 dance” printed on them.
Research Scientist, Janelle Shane tried to see if AI could produce some appropriate messages for Love Hearts. Initially she took a neural network with no understanding of English and showed it 366 Love Heart Candy messages. The AI was asked to imitate the messages. This is a sample of the output.
I am not sure that this AI is winning many hearts with these messages. Janelle then used the GPT-2 neural network which has an established understanding of English (from scanning millions of web pages). The AI predicted a phase that would normally follow the messages on a real Love Heart Candy. Again, AI has a lot to learn about love. Here are a few samples.
At one level it is somewhat reassuring that machines have not yet learnt to love. However, it seems inevitable that that time will come.
Animating Old Family Photos
In July 2019 we looked at Living Portraits where photos of famous people were animated to appear as if the person was alive and moving for a few seconds. It is the most visited story on my blog (by a long long way).
Now MyHeritage has added that technology to their family tree website to allow you to upload family photos and animate them for free. You can find the instructions here.
This is my Grandmother in a photo from about 1930.
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 or comment below.
I would also appreciate it if you could forward this newsletter to anyone that you think might be interested.
Till next week.