The creator economy has always challenged the status quo around who can have influence, whose voice can be heard, who gets to work with brands and who gets to be a brand. With this disruption, there have come more opportunities for people from historically excluded communities to monetize their creative talents and perspectives, establish influence…Read More
Europe’s biggest battery energy storage system has officially begun its operation in Cottingham, UK. The system — which is the largest by megawatts per hour — aims to store electricity generated from renewable sources, such as wind turbines and solar farms, before releasing it at times of high customer demand. The so-called “Pillswood project” was developed by North Yorkshire renewable power firm Harmony Energy Income Trust and uses Autobidder, Tesla’s algorithmic trading platform. According to the company, the facility has the capacity to store up to 196MWh of electricity in a single cycle, making it able to power around 300,000 UK…
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Last month we shared the launch of Matter 1.0, a new smart home standard developed in collaboration within the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). They’re developing a single open-source stack that enables developers to build compatible cross-platform devices. Imagine, for example, an Amazon device that integrates with Google Home or Apple Home Kit. Since its launch, it has been well-received by hardware makers. 190 products have received certification or are queued for testing and certification. There have been 4,400 downloads of the new Matter specification and 2,500 downloads of the Matter software development kit (SDK) from GitHub. Crucially, Matter not only…
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A decentralized, distributed ledger that tracks and stores every transaction in a verifiable way, the blockchain records transactions across multiple nodes (or computers) in such a way that the registered transaction cannot be altered retroactively. That’s a big difference between a traditional database where information is held centrally and it makes it impossible for any single person or entity to control all the nodes. For a technology that is so relatively new — it was only invented in 2008 by an unknown person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto (The word “Satoshi” means “clear thinking, quick witted” in Japanese),…
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The uncomfortable truth behind Christmas is that many beloved festive traditions are bad for the planet. Awareness is growing around the environmental impact of the holiday season, which often comes with increased consumption, food waste and excess plastic packaging for gifts and wrapping paper. Just days after the end of COP 27 (the United Nations…Read More
For Thanksgiving 2021, we got to the bottom of why Ocean Spray labels its cranberry sauce upside-down. In 2022, we’re looking at another popular canned good this time of year: Libby’s 100% Pure Pumpkin. The nearly 200-year-old brand calls itself the No. 1 canned pumpkin in the U.S., and claims to sell “enough cans to…Read More
At no other time of year are consumers beset with as many choices and decisions as the holiday shopping season. Consider the following: At press time, Walmart was advertising a cashmere padded leather coat for $79.99. Then there’s the other end of the gifting spectrum: For those with finer tastes and deeper pockets, Overland Sheepskin…Read More
The Harvard Business Review, synonymous with the business case study, has lately become a model of sustainable media itself, due in large part to a burgeoning digital subscriptions business and an increasingly diversified revenue stream. The publisher, which marked its 100th anniversary in October, has capitalized on the economic uncertainty of the last few years…Read More
One of London’s longest-running independent creative agencies 23red, which works with charities and governments to drive behavior shifts in audiences, has been acquired by consultancy Capgemini. The financial terms were not disclosed. The agency, which was founded in 2000 to focus on third-sector clients by chief executive Jane Asscher and executive creative director Sean Kinmont,…Read More
Engineering problems are difficult, but they have a right answer.
People problems, by their nature, are on a spectrum, a distribution of possible forward paths. But they’re complicated. A situation might not fit a person, and vice versa. Add a second person and know you have two people, and two people interacting exponentially increase the number of possibilities.
Knowing this takes the pressure off. Because there isn’t a perfect solution to a people problem. Simply an available path forward that helps us get to the next step.
