Innovation and emerging technology in the news

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was in the news, telling some employees they will be allowed to work from home in perpetuity, even after the coronavirus pandemic ends? I’m personally hopeful that at least some of the current remote working arrangements will become the defacto standard. I’m hearing some execs making similar noises, but I can’t call it. I wouldn’t be surprised if our old habits start to creep back in.
• I wrote about Lilt last week and since then they’ve just announced closing Series B funding for $25M led by Intel Capital. One to keep an eye on as I said.
• AR/VR watch. I’m not seeing much in the news about AR/VR for Enterprise – only niche industry, training or gaming. Still, here’s one from BBC news on medics using mixed reality to help treat Covid-19 patients.
• Smart cities is another I would assume would gain more opportunity in the current climate.  ITPro cites Cisco UK’s head of IoT and Smart Cities blaming messy data. I think this is symptomatic of the complex challenges in bringing together infrastructure, government, industry and technology. Maybe we need some help from Opensource communities in this space??

Articles & Reading

• Coen Olde Olthof, CEO at Neuroscience Tech startup Alpha.one posted about dwindling attention spans, pointing to an article in National Affairs by Adam Garfinkle titled ‘The Erosion of Deep Literacy’, which describes how our dependency on pervasive IT devices is affecting our society and culture in significant but uncertain ways. Well worth a read, but you’ll need to schedule an hour to do so, else re-inforcing the point about attention spans!
• Gregor Hohpe, Enterprise Strategists at AWS posts about his cautious views on building a Cloud Centre of Excellence, and refers to a colleagues blog. Lots of strong views ensue, but some pragmatic tips worth checking out. LINK.

Tech spotlight – interesting disruptive technology vendors on my radar

Check out Materialize, bringing real-time event streaming into the grasp of SQL and BI tools, more traditionally associated with batch processing. A really interesting concept, in part aimed at companies who don’t have rich Microservices able to exploit real-time data in their digital applications. Quite a young company, but backed by Lightspeed and definitely going on my radar.

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