Tom Raftery's Weekly Tech for Good Newsletter - Issue #25

Another week, another newsletter! A bunch of new people have subscribed in the last week, so if this is your first time receiving this newsletter, welcome, and thanks for joining us here. We'll all bunch up a bit to make some room 😉 I have some really excellent stories for you this week, and as always pointers to my most recent podcasts and livestreams And with that, onto this week's stories...

March 10, 2021

Another week, another newsletter! A bunch of new people have subscribed in the last week, so if this is your first time receiving this newsletter, welcome, and thanks for joining us here. We'll all bunch up a bit to make some room 😉

I have some really excellent stories for you this week, and as always pointers to my most recent podcasts and livestreams

And with that, onto this week's stories...

Tech for Good stories of the week

Images are flowing back from NASA's Perseverance Rover at an incredible rate. At this site you can now find over 9100 raw images which you can download, share, make videos, desktops with etc. Hours of fun to be had...

And sticking with the space theme, SpaceX has launched another batch of its Starlink satellites — the usual complement of 60 of the low Earth orbit spacecraft, which will join the more than 1,000 already making up the existing constellation. When SpaceX reaches 1,200 satellites, it should be able to provide internet connectivity to most of the globe, but the ultimate aim is to have a constellation of over 30,000 satellites (!) - how this will impact astronomy remains to be seen

When Starlink first allowed people to register interest, I signed up to be notified when it would be available in my area (Seville, South of Spain), and I received the email below in late February. Starlink is offering connectivity of 50-150mb/s, and latency of 20-40ms. With my current provider I'm getting connectivity of 800mb/s and a letency of around 8ms, but that is FTTH, so it is hardly a fair comparison. For some this will be a very compelling offering

Volkswagen has announced that similar to Tesla, it will now be giving owners of its fully electric ID.3 and ID.4 vehicles in Europe Over The Air (OTA) updates. I own a Nissan Leaf and recently received a call from Nissan to say there was a software update available for my car. I was given an appointment to bring the car to the dealer, where I left it for an hour while the software was updated. The ability to have cars download updates OTA, just like phones is something Tesla has had for years, and will be a compelling feature for the VW cars - especially if they keep up a cadence of 3 monthly updates and add features, and performance improvements, the way Tesla has done

I've known for some time that Iceland takes full advantage of its geothermal resources, but I was unaware of how well Kenya is exploiting geothermal energy - it seemingly has the highest percentage of geothermal in its national energy mix (38%) of any nation, and it is bringing more on line all the time. This is an excellent explainer on geothermal, the Rift Valley, and Kenya's use of this abundant energy source. One aspect that is played down is the up-front capital cost of geothermal, which is a reason it hasn't gone very far in other countries

Now two stories from the world of AR/VR/MR - this is a space that really seems to be heating up - first up Apple

Apple plans to release a mixed reality headset "in mid-2022," followed by augmented reality glasses type by 2025, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today in a research note with TF International Securities. The research note goes on to talk about Apple developing connected contact lenses for sometime after 2030, but that falls under the realm of pure speculation. However the Headset is already at prototype stage weighing in at around 200-300g. Apple wants to half that weight before it launches the device, supposedly next year...

And then Microsoft launched their new Mesh Platform. At its simplest, the Mesh platform is meant to make Teams-like meetings more in-person like as you can interact in virtual 3D space with the avatar of the person/people you are connected to. Microsoft have bigger plans though and have opened up the platform to developers to see what else can come from this

Digital Supply Chain (DSC) podcast

On the Digital Supply Chain podcast this last week I talked to

  • SAP's Jörg Michaelis and Peter Flensberg about Advanced Shipping and Receiving - a new product from SAP to help organisations struggling to meet the demands from the shift to e-commerce, scale up to match or exceed the increased requirements for better data visibility in transport and logistics. Check out that episode here

  • and in Monday's episode I had a fascinating conversation with SAP's Program Manager for Robotics, Dr Albrecht Ricken. We talked about a new open source product SAP is releasing called Warehouse Robotics which enables organisations to reduce the time to deploy robots from months, to minutes. You can check out that episode here

Climate 21 podcast

On the Climate 21 podcast this week I talked to

  • The Head of Impact Strategy for Impossible Foods, Rebekah Moses. Impossible Foods, if you've not hears of them make the Impossible Burger, and also now the Impossible Sausage - both products look just like they are made from regular meat, but they are in fact meat from plants. Rebekah and I had an excellent conversation about how meat from plants vastly reduces land use, energy use, and water use. Oh, and there's no animal slaughter either! Check out our conversation here

Other podcast appearances

So, the shoe was on the other foot a couple of times this week when I

  • appeared as a guest on Karin Bursa's excellent TekTok podcast (part of the Supply Chain Now platform of blogs, podcasts, and livestreams) - we had an excellent conversation bridging sustainability and supply chain and I

  • appeared on Tony Flath's The Wave of Change podcast and we had a wide ranging chat about many different aspects of technology, and where things are going. Tony is currently looking for a new role, so if you're aware of anything in tech sales, it wouldn't hurt to check out his LinkedIn profile

Livestreams

My regular Tuesday Tech for Good was my only livestream this week

  • I put out my regular weekly Tech for Good - live show yesterday, and as ever this week's show went really well. We had lots of great stories (some of which you can see further up in this newsletter - but we went deeper into them in the livestream) and there was great audience participation as well. You can check out the replay here

And finally...

Thanks for your interest and attention. If you like this newsletter, tell a friend. Heck tell all your friends!

And, if you have any comments/questions/suggestions on how to make it better, feel free to let me know :)

Have a great rest of your week

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