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Google leading the AI race: The Economist
 COMMANDING the plot lines of Hollywood films, covers of magazines and reams of newsprint, the contest between artificial intelligence (AI) and mankind draws much attention. Doomsayers warn that AI could eradicate jobs, break laws and start wars. But such predictions concern the distant future. The competition today is not between humans and machines but among the world’s technology giants, which are investing feverishly to get a lead over each other in AI.

An exponential increase in the availability of digital data, the force of computing power and the brilliance of algorithms has fuelled excitement about this formerly obscure corner of computer science. The West’s largest tech firms, including Alphabet (Google’s parent), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft are investing huge sums to develop their AI capabilities, as are their counterparts in China. Although it is difficult to separate tech firms’ investments in AI from other kinds, so far in 2017 (see chart 1) companies globally have completed around $21.3bn in mergers and acquisitions related to AI, according to PitchBook, a data provider, or around 26 times more than in 2015.

Machine learning is the branch of AI that is most relevant to these firms. Computers sift through data to recognise patterns and make predictions without being explicitly programmed to do so. The technique is now used in all manner of applications in the tech industry, including online ad targeting, product recommendations, augmented reality and self-driving cars. Zoubin Ghahramani, who leads AI research at Uber, believes that AI will be as transformative as the rise of computers.

One way to understand AI’s potential impact is to look at databases. From the 1980s these made it cheap to store information, pull out insights and handle cognitive tasks such as inventory management. Databases powered the first generation of software; AI will make the next far more predictive and responsive, says Frank Chen of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm. An application such as Google’s Gmail, which scans the content of e-mails and suggests quick, one-touch replies on mobile devices, is an early example of what could be coming.

As with past waves of new technology, such as the rise of personal computers and mobile telephony, AI has the potential to shake up the businesses of the tech giants by helping them overhaul existing operations and dream up new enterprises. But it also comes with a sense of menace. “If you’re a tech company and you’re not building AI as a core competence, then you’re setting yourself up for an invention from the outside,” says Jeff Wilke, chief executive of “worldwide consumer” at Amazon, and adjutant to Jeff Bezos.

Fuelled by rivalry, high hopes and hype, the AI boom can feel like the first California gold rush. Although Chinese firms such as Baidu and Alibaba are also investing in AI, and deploying it in their home market, the most visible prospectors are Western tech firms. Alphabet is widely perceived to be in the lead. It has been making sizeable profits from AI for years and has many of the best-known researchers. But it is early days and the race is far from over. Over the next several years, large tech firms are going to go head-to-head in three ways. They will continue to compete for talent to help train their corporate “brains”; they will try to apply machine learning to their existing businesses more effectively than rivals; and they will try to create new profit centres with the help of AI.

Idiot savants

The most frenzied rush is for human talent, which is far more scarce than either data or computing power. Demand for AI “builders” who can apply machine-learning techniques to huge sets of data in creative ways has ballooned, far exceeding the number of top students who have studied the techniques.

Today AI systems are like “idiot savants,” says Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft. “They are great at what they do, but if you don’t use them correctly, it’s a disaster.” Hiring the right people can be critical to a firm’s survival (some startups fail for lack of the right AI skills) which has set off a trend of firms plundering academic departments to hire professors and graduate students before they finish their degrees.

Job fairs now resemble frantic “Thanksgiving Black Friday sales at Walmart”, says Andrew Moore, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) school of computer science, a pioneering institution in AI (whose robotics department was famously plundered by Uber in 2015). Academic conferences, such as this week’s Neural Information Processing Systems in Long Beach, California, double up as places to shop for talent (see article). The best recruiters are academia’s AI celebrities: people like Yann LeCun of Facebook and Geoffrey Hinton of Google—both former professors who keep a university affiliation—can attract others to work alongside them. Proprietary data can also serve as a draw, if the huge salaries are not enough.

If none of that works, companies buy whole startups. The tech industry first took notice of this trend in 2014, when Google spent an estimated $500m on DeepMind, a startup with no revenue or marketable product but a team of “deep learning” researchers; after the deal they designed a program that beat the world champion at “Go”, an ancient board game. Other firms have also shelled out to buy money-losing startups, which are typically valued not on future profits or even sales but instead receive a price for each employee that can be as much as $5m-10m.

Behind closed doors

Companies have different philosophies about how to deal with staff. Some, such as Microsoft and IBM, invest heavily in AI research and publish a large number of papers (see chart 2), but do not require researchers to apply their findings to money-making activities. At the opposite end of the scale are Apple and Amazon, which do not have enormous research initiatives, expect all work to feed into products and are tight-lipped about their work. Google and Facebook are somewhere in between on whether researchers must toil only on money-making ventures.

The intense battle for talent may force secretive companies to become more open. “If you tell them, ‘come work with us but you can’t tell anyone what you’re working on’, then they won’t come because you’ll be killing their career,” explains Mr LeCun, who leads Facebook’s AI research lab. This trade-off between secrecy and the need to attract people also applies to the Chinese giants, which are trying to establish Western outposts and hire American researchers. Baidu has opened two research labs with an AI focus in Silicon Valley, in 2013 and this year. Western AI researchers rate them highly but prefer to work for the American giants, in part due to their relative transparency. If companies can lure the right people in AI, the effect is to extend their workforces exponentially. AI is “like having a million interns” at one’s disposal, says Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz. That computational power is then integrated into firms’ existing businesses. The advantages of AI are most visible in firms’ predictions of what users want. Automated recommendations and suggestions are responsible for around three-quarters of what people watch on Netflix, for example, and more than a third of what people buy on Amazon. Facebook, which owns the popular app Instagram, uses machine learning to recognise the content of posts, photos and videos and display relevant ones to users, as well as filter out spam. In the past it ranked posts chronologically, but serving up posts and ads by relevance keeps users more engaged. Without machine learning, Facebook would never have achieved its current scale, argues Joaquin Candela, head of its applied AI group. Companies that did not use AI in search, or were late to do so, struggled, as in the case of Yahoo and its search engine, and also Microsoft’s Bing.

Amazon and Google have gone furthest in applying AI to a range of operations. Machine learning makes Amazon’s online and physical operations more efficient. It has around 80,000 robots in its fulfilment centres, and also uses AI to categorise inventory and decide which trucks to allocate packages to. For grocery ordering, it has applied computer vision to recognise which strawberries and other fruits are ripe and fresh enough to be delivered to customers, and is developing autonomous drones that will one day deliver orders.

As for Google, it uses AI to categorise content on YouTube, its online-video website, and weed out (some) objectionable material, and also to identify people and group them in its app, Google Photos. AI is also embedded in Android, its operating system, helping it to work more smoothly and to predict which apps people are interested in using. Google Brain is regarded in the field of AI as one of the best research groups at applying machine-learning advances profitably, for example by improving search algorithms. As for DeepMind, the British firm may not ever generate much actual revenue for Alphabet, but it has helped its parent save money by increasing the energy efficiency of its global data centres (and its Go experiment was a public-relations coup).

Artificial intelligence is also being applied in the corporate world. David Kenny, the boss of Watson, IBM’s AI platform, predicts that there will be “two AIs”: companies that profit from offering AI-infused services to consumers and others which offer them to businesses. In practice, the two worlds meet because of the tech giants’ cloud-computing arms. Providers are competing to use AI as a way to differentiate their offerings and lock in customers. The three largest—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud—offer application-programming interfaces (APIs) that provide machine-learning capabilities to other companies. Microsoft’s cloud offering, Azure, for example, helped Uber build a verification tool that asks drivers to take a selfie to confirm their identities when they work. Google Cloud offers a “jobs API”, which helps companies match jobseekers with the best positions.

AI on the brain

Many firms in other industries, from retailing to media, stand to benefit from what those in the cloud business tout as the “democratisation” of AI. Providing AI to companies that do not have the skills or scale to build up sophisticated capabilities independently could be a money-spinner in the $250bn cloud market. But providers often must customise APIs for clients’ complex needs, which is time-consuming. Microsoft, with its history of selling software to clients and offering them support, seems likely to do well in this area. It is only a matter of time before AI offerings become “more and more self-help”, counters Diane Greene, who runs Google Cloud.

IBM is another contender, having backed a huge marketing campaign for its Watson platform. AI researchers tend to be dismissive of IBM, which has a large consulting business and a reputation for valuing time billed over terabytes. The firm’s critics also point out that, although IBM has invested over $15bn in Watson and spent $5bn between 2010 and 2015 to buy companies, much of that with the aim of acquiring proprietary data, for the most part it does not have unique data of its own. But IBM’s weaknesses may not hold it back. Bosses of most businesses feel pressure to have an AI strategy, and they will pay handsomely to acquire one quickly.

To date tech giants have mostly tried to apply AI to reap profits from their existing operations. In the next few years they hope that AI will let them build new businesses. One area of intense competition is virtual assistants. Smartphones know their users intimately, but AI-powered virtual assistants aim to take the relationship further, whether through phones or smartspeakers. Apple was first to explore their promise when it bought Siri, a voice assistant, in 2010. Since then Amazon, Google and Microsoft have invested heavily: their assistants’ speech recognition is better as a result. Samsung, Facebook and Baidu are also competing to offer them.

One algorithm to rule them all

It is unclear whether standalone speakers will become a huge market, but it is certain that people will move beyond text to engage with the internet. “All these companies understand that whoever owns that choke point for consumers will rule the market,” says Pedro Domingos, author of “The Master Algorithm”, a book about AI.

Further into the future, augmented-reality (AR) devices are another AI-infused opportunity. Mobile apps like Snap, a messaging app, and the game Pokémon Go are early examples of AR. But AR could more radically transform people’s relationship with the internet, so that they consume digital information not from a small screen but via an ambient, ever-present experience. AR devices will offer portable AI capabilities, such as simultaneous translation and facial recognition.

In the race for AR, big tech firms have not got much beyond the warm-up phase. Google and Apple have launched AR software-development kits; they both want developers to build apps that use AR on their platforms. There is also a rush to develop AR hardware. Google was early to launch a prototype for AR glasses, but they flopped. Microsoft has developed a headset it calls HoloLens, but with a price of between $3,000-5,000, it is a niche product. Other firms, including Facebook and Apple, are thought to be planning their own offerings. Being ahead in AI could translate into big leads in these new fields.

Nowhere is that truer than in the realm of autonomous vehicles. Tech firms are driving millions of miles to build up big, proprietary datasets, and are making use of computer vision to train their systems to recognise objects in the real world. The potential spoils are huge. Personal transportation is a vast market, worth around $10trn globally, and whoever cracks self-driving cars can apply their knowledge to other AI-based projects, such as drones and robots. Unlike search engines, where people may choose to use a service that is good enough, users are more likely to favour self-driving cars with the best safety record, meaning that the companies that best employ AI to map out the physical world and register the fewest crashes will enjoy outsize benefits.

Each firm is approaching the problem differently. Baidu, the Chinese giant, is trying to create a self-driving-car operating system, much like Google’s Android in mobile devices (although it is unclear how it plans to make money). Alphabet has its own autonomous-car effort, as do Uber, Tesla, an electric carmaker, a herd of little-known startups and, increasingly, established carmakers. (Apple is rumoured to have scaled back its car ambitions.)

Self-driving cars are just one example of how technology firms’ AI strategies are pushing beyond the virtual world of software into hardware. Many companies, including Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft, are also investing to build specialised, powerful “AI chips” that can power their various activities. These will compete with those made by NVIDIA, a tech firm that has built an empire on powerful chips used in various AI realms, such as autonomous cars and virtual reality.

It is unclear whether the likes of Alphabet and Apple will sell these chips to rival firms or keep them for themselves. They have an incentive to use their innovations to improve their own services, rather than renting or selling them to rivals—which could become a problem if it means a very few firms develop a meaningful advantage in brute computing power.

That begs the broader question of whether AI will further concentrate power among today’s digital giants. It seems likely that the incumbent tech groups will capture many of AI’s gains, given their wealth of data, computing power, smart algorithms and human talent, not to mention a head start on investing. History points to the likelihood of concentration; both databases and personal computers ushered in ascendancies, if only for a while, of a tiny group of tech firms (Oracle and IBM in databases, Microsoft and Apple in personal computers).

By the metrics that count—talent, computing power and data—Google appears to be in the lead in AI. It can afford the cleverest people and has such a variety of projects, from drones to cars to smart software, that people interested in machine learning rarely leave. Other firms had to learn to take AI seriously, but Google’s founders were early devotees of machine learning and always saw it as a competitive edge.

AI’s spiritual home

Some in the tech industry, such as Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, worry about Alphabet and other firms monopolising AI talent and expertise. He and a handful of other prominent Silicon Valley bosses funded OpenAI, a not-for-profit research outfit focused on AI with no corporate affiliation. Mr Musk and others are worried about what might happen when a firm finally cracks “general intelligence”, the ability of a computer to perform any human task without being explicitly programmed to do so. Such a vision is probably decades away, but that does not stop Google from talking about it. “We absolutely want to” crack general AI, says Jeff Dean, the boss of Google Brain. If a firm were to manage this, it could change the competitive landscape entirely.

In the meantime, much will depend on whether tech firms are open and collaborative. In addition to publishing papers, many companies today make their machine-learning software libraries open source, offering internal tools to rivals and independent developers. Google’s library, TensorFlow, is particularly popular. Facebook has open-sourced two of its libraries, Caffe2 and Pytorch. Openness has strategic advantages. As they are used, the libraries are debugged, and the firms behind them get reputational benefits. “Beware of geeks bearing gifts,” quips Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, another non-profit research group.

One guru of the field worries that libraries such as TensorFlow will bring in talented researchers but that their owners may start charging later on, or use them for profit in other ways. Such caution may prove wise, but few think about the long term when a gold rush is under way. So it is now in Silicon Valley. Most techies are too consumed by the promise and potential profits of AI to spend too much time worrying about the future.

Output: Google is leading the charge in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), thanks to projects including DeepMind, TensorFlow and Google Brain, according to an article in The Economist. It said that Google's combination of huge quantities of data, computing power, human talent and smart algorithms help put the search giant ahead of its rivals, and could give it the edge when it comes to scaling and commercialising rapidly evolving AI technologies, such as autonomous cars and virtual reality.


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Rwanda launches healthcare platform to entice medical tourists
 New drive to ease access to specialised medical care

Ordinarily, a Rwandan seeking specialized treatment abroad would go through a rigorous process. Most of them go through agents of various international hospitals who will come with a markup price while others rely on friends and family abroad to get them appointments.

Output: Rwanda is looking to establish itself as a medical tourism hub after a local start-up launched a health services booking and travel platform. Revisions to the visa regime and expanded flights for local carrier RwandAir are also expected to draw in more overseas patients. The platform, managed by Infinite Health International, the African representative of healthcare services provider Best in Class Care, offers patients immediate virtual consultations, while those with medical referrals can access care in accredited Rwandan hospitals, as well as get help with medical travel. The service also aims to give Rwandans better access to healthcare.


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Brexit is a distraction from UK's economic downfall: Mitchell
 As Brexiteers shout “forward” and remainers chant “ back”, the battle over the EU dominates British politics. Yet it obscures a more basic British problem. Our clapped-out economy, brilliant at consumption, poor at production, is becoming unviable. A “nation of shopkeepers” has become a nation of shoppers, dependent on debt.

Deindustrialisation and misguided economic policies have reduced the former workshop of the world to a level where Britain can neither pay its way, nor afford the defence and public services an advanced society needs. Everything in which we once were leaders – ships, railways, TV, great bridges, nuclear plants, bicycles, textiles, clothing, even Kit Kats – we now import.

We consume more than we produce, leading to an annual balance of payments deficit rising above 6% of GDP, financed by borrowing and selling companies, property and citizenship to survive. The result is a sluggish economy (a growing proportion of which is owned by foreigners); low productivity (because the manufacturing sector has shrunk to one-tenth of GDP); and static pay, as every sector except finance cuts costs to survive.

Being in or out of the EU has little relevance to this basic problem. The EU is a market, not a mutual support system. Instead of redistributing growth to succour laggards it punishes them, as it has Greece. It drains us and proscribes the techniques of nurture by state aid, protectionism and devaluation by which Germany and France grew. Its “aid” is just our own money back, with the EU’s heavy costs taken out. Even worse, Germany’s huge surpluses mean that deficit countries like the UK, with our £60bn-plus trade deficit, are compounded by the single market.

Yet coming out offers no solution either. It generates uncertainty and deters investment. Most of world trade is controlled by multinationals, and Britain would be more vulnerable to their ministrations. Tory Brexiteers aim at turning us, down and dirty, into a low-wage, deregulated, cost-cutting tax haven-on-Thames. Hardly acceptable to an electorate that has already endured decades of that.

Training and upskilling are little use without industries to employ the beneficiaries

The only solution is to rebalance an economy excessively dependent on finance and services by widening the manufacturing and production base and making it competitive. Neither free trade nor the single market will do that. New industries don’t just come, still less grow to scale, or become national champions like VW, Samsung or Toyota, unaided. The only historic model of rebuilding is that used by Germany and Japan after the second world war, and later by young dragons such as Korea and Taiwan, followed now by China.

All built powerful exporting sectors by the opposite methods to those that have reduced Britain to its present pass. They used a devalued exchange rate, deliberately kept low to penalise imports and boost exports. They built up powerful exporting sectors and strong competitor companies by industrial policy, state support and investment, while restraining domestic demand to channel ability and investment into production. The result was a process of continuous improvement, while Britain wound down.

Harsh treatment, but what alternative do we have? Neoliberalism has damaged, not boosted. Shelf-stacking and delivery driving for the consumer society offer few prospects. The Washington consensus doesn’t work. Training and upskilling are little use without industries to employ the beneficiaries. The financial sector is better at producing wealth for the few than jobs for the many.

The government’s new industrial strategy offers hope without muscle. Our civil servants are hopeless at working with industry. We lack the French pantouflage skill at transferring their elite civil servants between public and private sectors, while Treasury rules make financial support bureaucratic and restrictive. Our governments have been generous to the banks, not to manufacturing. Finance prefers safe lending on mortgages to venture capital. Our unions don’t work like the German ones do in the Mitbestimmung system. Our companies look to short-term profit rather than long-term growth. Our capitalism is better at rent-seeking than competing.

Serious policies of state support, economic discipline, corporate governance and investment priorities are essential to make Britain’s economy fit for use, in or out of the single market. Widening and deepening our industrial base requires a substantial devaluation, a restraint on domestic living standards, an industrial policy sustained by state intervention, investment and a venture capitalism that will allow a hundred plants to blossom. Britain won’t make it unless it can make things and sell them to the world.

The prospect is daunting. Hopes for a government strong enough to do it look slim, and an electorate already alienated by years of austerity to no purpose won’t welcome more tough measures. Perhaps we’re set on a path of decline which has to go further and hurt more, before anything is done. Yet nothing will be, unless our political elite grasps the real problem. The argument over EU membership is just another distraction.

Output: A sluggish economy, low productivity and static pay are bigger threats to the UK than Brexit, according to former Labour MP for Grimsby, Austin Mitchell. Deindustrialisation and economic policy have turned the UK into "a nation of shoppers, dependent on debt", says Mitchell. An annual balance of payments deficit of over 6% of GDP demonstrates this consumption, he states. Mitchell advises a turn to reindustrialisation and a more long-term approach to growth.


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Boeing aims to beat Elon Musk to be first to land humans on Mars
 Take that Elon Musk! Boeing will beat SpaceX to Mars, CEO Dennis Muilenburg told CNBC.

Musk has made it clear that sending humans to Mars is one of his primary goals, even saying it is the reason he started SpaceX in the first place.

But Boeing is in the final assembly stages of building a rocket called the Space Launch System with NASA, and the company will be the first to bring humans to the red planet, Muilenberg told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview.

Boeing expects to have the system ready for a test flight in 2019.

"Eventually we are going to go to Mars, and I firmly believe that the first person that sets foot on Mars will get there in a Boeing rocket," he said.

SpaceX was not immediately available for comment.

Musk unveiled plans for a massive SpaceX rocket and spacecraft system called the "BFR" in September. It will ultimately replace all of SpaceX's current lineup, and will be used for space exploration and for rapid transport around Earth.

"I feel fairly confident we can build the ship and be ready for the launch in five years," Musk said during his presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia in late September. "Five years seems like a long time for me."

Output: The CEO of aircraft manufacturer Boeing has revealed the company is working with NASA to build a rocket capable of reaching Mars. Dennis Muilenburg said Boeing's Space Launch System rocket is due for a test flight in 2019 and added: "I firmly believe that the first person that sets foot on Mars will get there in a Boeing rocket." In contrast, Elon Musk estimated his SpaceX system "BFR", plans for which were unveiled in September, would be ready for launch in five years.


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YouTube plans to launch a music-streaming service
 Spotify and Apple Music may have a new streaming rival in 2018.

YouTube is planning to launch a standalone paid music streaming service in March 2018, according to a report at Bloomberg.

According to sources, the service will be called Remix and is expected to feature on-demand music streaming like Spotify alongside a video clip element borrowed from YouTube. No pricing details have been confirmed as yet.

Remix wouldn’t be the first time that YouTube’s parent company Alphabet has launched a streaming service: as well as Google Play Music, launched in 2011, there was 2014’s ad-free music video service YouTube Music Key, which turned into subscription service YouTube Red in 2016.

According to Bloomberg’s report, Warner Music Group has already signed onto the service with Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and independent label consortium Merlin also said to be in talks.

Remix will be entering a crowded marketplace: as well as Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal, the new streaming service will also have Amazon’s recent Music Unlimited to contend with.

Read next: How the technology behind Bitcoin could change the music industry – and help everyone get paid

Output: Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, will launch music-streaming service Remix in March 2018, according to reports. Warner Music Group is said to have already signed up for the service, with talks going on with independent label consortium Merlin, as well as Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. No pricing details have been released. Remix marks Alphabet's third foray into the increasingly competitive sector, following Google Play Music in 2011 and YouTube Music Key, launched in 2014 and rebranded as YouTube Red two years later.


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Starling Bank connects with Railsbank to use its open API
 Starling Bank has hopped on to the Railsbank platform, providing a firm footing for businesses to issue UK bank accounts and access Faster Payments via the Railsbank Open API.

Launched last year by serial entrepreneur Nigel Verdon, Railsbank promises to provide businesses with access to global banking services with just five lines of code.

Starling - which announced plans to move into the business banking market in October - now joins Railsbank stakeholder Arkéa Banking Services, a subsidiary of Credit Mutuel Arkéa, on the startup's banking panel.

COO and co-founder of Railsbank Clive Mitchell says: “We are delighted to be partnered with the team at Starling and to be one of the first aggregator platform live on Starling. It shows that our partner bank network is growing quickly, and that wholesale open banking with APIs is a reality."

Output: Mobile challenger bank Starling Bank has joined the Railsbank platform, giving businesses access to UK banking services and Faster Payments through Railsbank's open API. Starling also joins the start-up's banking panel alongside Arkéa Banking Services. Railsbank's COO, Clive Mitchell, said the deal “shows wholesale open banking with APIs is a reality".


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Grocery band Kroger attempts to challenge Amazon and Walmart
 Amazon’s advertising business is worth at least $1 billion, and Walmart has a growing advertising platform, too. Kroger, one of the biggest grocery brands in the U.S., is also venturing into retail media. Kroger is selling its suppliers ad units and solutions, and it is developing a programmatic platform that will go live next year.

Kroger, which owns the likes of Harris Teeter, Baker’s and Fred Meyer Jewelers, generated $27.7 billion in sales from July to September of this year, up 4.5 percent from the same period a year prior, according its quarterly earnings report released in November. Approximately half of all U.S. households have a Kroger loyalty card, which drives nearly 90 percent of Kroger’s sales, according to the company. Like Walmart, Kroger boasts that its loyalty program data and purchase data gathered from its mobile apps, brand websites and around 2,800 stores across 35 states in the U.S. can help its suppliers (mostly consumer packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble) serve targeted ads on Kroger’s properties and the open web.

Kroger’s sales pitch may sound familiar, as mass retailers like Amazon and Walmart all use their consumer purchase data as the cornerstone to carve out a media business. But different from Amazon, which has an in-house media division called Amazon Marketing Group, and Walmart, whose media platform was largely built by WPP-owned Triad Retail Media (which also creates ad units to sell for other retailers), Kroger bought the data analytics piece of agency Dunnhumby (formerly a joint venture between Kroger and Tesco) around three years ago to form its own consumer insights subsidiary called 84.51°.

“CPG brands today are splitting their marketing spend between trade and advertising. Trade promotion is one of the industry’s largest investments — this is promotional dollars to influence brick-and-mortar sale pricing like temporary price reductions,” said Cara Pratt, vp of customer communications product strategy and innovation for 84.51°. “CPGs shift their marketing budgets across vehicles — many of which deliver against different business objectives, but all are intended to [generate] sales. Our science and Kroger’s customer insights help CPG brands drive actions.”

Kroger is the only retailer that the 84.51° team of 775 serves. The division also helps more than 300 CPG clients understand how to better use Kroger’s data and third-party data for advertising. The majority of 84.51° employees are based in its Cincinnati office, which is only a 10-minute walk from the Kroger headquarters. A small team in Portland, Oregon, is also responsible for media planning and buying for the Kroger brand, according to Bob Welch, svp of customer communications and Kroger media services for 84.51°.

Welch said Kroger’s advertising business has two pillars: One component is Kroger’s customer communications program, where the retailer runs direct and email campaigns for its suppliers with tailored content and promotions; the other is what the company calls “precision marketing solution,” powered by Kroger’s purchase data from 60 million households.

One offering under Kroger’s precision marketing solution is on-site advertising on Kroger.com. 84.51° is responsible for developing ad formats on the site and managing ad sales for Kroger, much like what Triad Retail Media does for Walmart. “You can say that we borrowed the Triad model, but the differentiation is our ability to personalize the experience,” said Pratt. “We can connect 96 percent of Kroger transactions to a customer, which allows us to serve very targeted product placement and drive better conversion.”

CPG clients can also buy co-branded media on the open web — largely display ads that include the Kroger logo and direct consumers to Kroger properties when they click on the ad — as well as run word-of-mouth campaigns through Kroger’s MyMagazine Sharing Network, where brands give out free products, and members give their feedback and share the product on social media in return, according to Pratt.

Pratt declined to share the total number of ad formats Kroger sells and the corresponding pricing model. “Some formats are CPM-based and some are [cost-per-click]-based,” she said. “CPC-based ads are more connected to search marketing.”

Most Kroger precision marketing buys are placed programmatically through a combination of programmatic direct and open exchange inventory, according to Pratt. 84.51° is also developing a programmatic platform that will be available in the next year to let advertisers buy ads on Kroger.com. Kroger’s ad solutions don’t apply to Harris Teeter or Roundy’s brands at the moment.

“Extending our capabilities to those newer brands to the Kroger family will occur in the future,” said Pratt.

Output: Kroger, one of the biggest grocery brands in the US, is working to develop its own media unit, offering data-driven, personalised ad campaigns to consumer packaged goods firms. Collaborating with data analytics firm 84.51°, Kroger helps brands optimise its data as well as third-party information for highly-targeted advertising. The retailer, whose loyalty card is held by half of US households, aims to take on rivals Amazon and Walmart with its programmatic offerings, and is set to launch a platform next year.


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Samsung Pay offers app for mobile banking in South Korea
 Samsung Electronics Co.'s mobile payment system is moving to expand into the banking sector to offer more diverse services to users, the South Korean tech giant said Sunday.

The company said that starting Thursday, the payment system installed on some of its newer smartphones can be used to carry out transactions at some local banks.

Under the upgrade, the 9 million domestic users of Samsung Pay, who can now use their phones like cash or credit cards, as well as at ATMs, will be able to withdraw or send money from accounts in Shinhan and Woori banks. This can be done by downloading a dedicated app on their smartphones.

The system makes full use of the iris scanner on its top of the line phones, with users no longer required to present bank books and ATM cards. The sending of money can be done without the use of one time password systems.

Samsung said it plans to expand the same services to other local lenders.

"The mobile payment is being developed so that it will one day fully replace a person's purse of wallet," a Samsung executive said.

Related to such an expansion, LG Pay, set up by Samsung's main domestic rival LG Electronics Inc., said it is moving to expand its services in more stores across the country.

The consumer electronics company said while its payment system is currently being offered only with its premium phones like the V30, it plans to incorporate the feature into mid-range phones starting next year. It said LG Pay will reach the United States next year. (Yonhap)

Output: South Korea's Samsung Electronics is upgrading the payment system on its latest smartphones to allow users to withdraw and send money using local banks Shinhan and Woori. The upgrade affects nine million domestic Samsung Pay users, who need to download a dedicated app to access the service, but will no longer need to rely on ATM cards after having done so. The company said it plans to expand the roll-out to other local banks.


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Data devices could use 20% of global electricity by 2025
 The communications industry could use 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, hampering attempts to meet climate change targets and straining grids as demand by power-hungry server farms storing digital data from billions of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected devices grows exponentially.

The industry has long argued that it can considerably reduce carbon emissions by increasing efficiency and reducing waste, but academics are challenging industry assumptions. A new paper, due to be published by US researchers later this month, will forecast that information and communications technology could create up to 3.5% of global emissions by 2020 – surpassing aviation and shipping – and up to 14% 2040, around the same proportion as the US today.

Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae.

In an update to a 2016 peer-reviewed study, Andrae found that without dramatic increases in efficiency, the ICT industry could use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. This would be more than any country except the US, China and India.

He expects industry power demand to increase from 200-300 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity a year now, to 1,200 or even 3,000TWh by 2025. Data centres on their own could produce 1.9 gigatonnes (Gt) (or 3.2% of the global total) of carbon emissions, he says.

“The situation is alarming,” said Andrae, who works for the Chinese communications technology firm Huawei. “We have a tsunami of data approaching. Everything which can be is being digitalised. It is a perfect storm. 5G [the fifth generation of mobile technology] is coming, IP [internet protocol] traffic is much higher than estimated, and all cars and machines, robots and artificial intelligence are being digitalised, producing huge amounts of data which is stored in data centres.”

US researchers expect power consumption to triple in the next five years as one billion more people come online in developing countries, and the “internet of things” (IoT), driverless cars, robots, video surveillance and artificial intelligence grows exponentially in rich countries.

“There will be 8.4bn connected things in 2017, setting the stage for 20.4bn internet of things devices to be deployed by 2020,” says the leading internet analyst firm Gartner.

The industry has encouraged the idea that the digital transformation of economies and large-scale energy efficiencies will slash global emissions by 20% or more, but the scale and speed of the revolution has been a surprise.

Global internet traffic will increase nearly threefold in the next five years says the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index, a leading industry tracker of internet use.

“More than one billion new internet users are expected, growing from three billion in 2015 to 4.1bn by 2020. Over the next five years global IP networks will support up to 10bn new devices and connections, increasing from 16.3bn in 2015 to 26bn by 2020,” says Cisco.

A 2016 Berkeley laboratory report for the US government estimated the country’s data centres, which held about 350m terabytes of data in 2015, could together need over 100TWh of electricity a year by 2020. This is the equivalent of about 10 large nuclear power stations.

Data centre capacity is also rocketing in Europe and Asia with London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam expected to add nearly 200MW of consumption in 2017, or the power equivalent of a medium size power station.

“We are seeing massive growth of data centres in all regions. Trends that started in the US are now standard in Europe. Asia is taking off massively,” says Mitual Patel, head of EMEA data centre research at global investment firm CBRE.

“The volume of data being handled by such centres is growing at unprecedented rates. They are seen as a key element in the next stage of growth for the ICT industry”, says Peter Corcoran, a researcher at the university of Ireland, Galway.

Using renewable energy sounds good but no one else benefits from what will be generated, and it skews national attempts to reduce emissions

Ireland, which with Denmark is becoming a data base for the world’s biggest tech companies, has 350MW connected to data centres but this is expected to triple to over 1,000MW, or the equivalent of a nuclear power station size plant, in the next five years.

Permission has been given for a further 550MW to be connected and 750MW more is in the pipeline, says Eirgrid, the country’s main grid operator.

“If all enquiries connect, the data centre load could account for 20% of Ireland’s peak demand,” says Eirgrid in its All-Island Generation Capacity Statement 2017-2026 report.

The data will be stored in vast new one million square feet or larger “hyper-scale” server farms, which companies are now building. The scale of these farms is huge; a single $1bn Apple data centre planned for Athenry in Co Galway, expects to eventually use 300MW of electricity, or over 8% of the national capacity and more than the daily entire usage of Dublin. It will require 144 large diesel generators as back up for when the wind does not blow.

Facebook’s Lulea data centre in Sweden, located on the edge of the Arctic circle, uses outside air for cooling rather than air conditioning and runs on hydroelectic power generated on the nearby Lule River. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Pressed by Greenpeace and other environment groups, large tech companies with a public face , including Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel and Amazon, have promised to use renewable energy to power data centres. In most cases they are buying it off grid but some are planning to build solar and wind farms close to their centres.

Greenpeace IT analyst Gary Cook says only about 20% of the electricity used in the world’s data centres is so far renewable, with 80% of the power still coming from fossil fuels.

“The good news is that some companies have certainly embraced their responsibility, and are moving quite aggressively to meet their rapid growth with renewable energy. Others are just growing aggressively,” he says.

Architect David Hughes, who has challenged Apple’s new centre in Ireland, says the government should not be taken in by the promises.

“Using renewable energy sounds good but no one else benefits from what will be generated, and it skews national attempts to reduce emissions. Data centres … have eaten into any progress we made to achieving Ireland’s 40% carbon emissions reduction target. They are just adding to demand and reducing our percentage. They are getting a free ride at the Irish citizens’ expense,” says Hughes.

Eirgrid estimates indicate that by 2025, one in every 3kWh generated in Ireland could be going to a data centre, he added. “We have sleepwalked our way into a 10% increase in electricity consumption.”

Fossil fuel plants may have to be kept open longer to power other parts of the country and the costs will fall on the consumer, he says. “We will have to upgrade our grid and build more power generation both wind and backup generation for when the wind isn’t there and this all goes onto people’s bills.”

Under a best case scenario, says Andrae, there will be massive continuous improvements of power saving, renewable energy will become the norm and the explosive growth in demand for data will slow.

But equally, he says, demand could continue to rise dramatically if the industry keeps growing at 20% a year, driverless cars each with dozens of embedded sensors, and cypto-currencies like Bitcoin which need vast amounts of computer power become mainstream.

“There is a real risk that it all gets out of control. Policy makers need to keep a close eye on this,” says Andrae.

Output: The rapidly growing communications industry, with its billions of smartphones, tablets and interconnected devices, could cause 3.5% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, 5.5% by 2025 and up to 14% by 2040. It is also on target to use 20% of the world's electricity by 2025. This is despite the industry long claiming that it can lower carbon emissions by reducing waste and increasing efficiency. The major technology companies have committed to using renewable energy for their data centres, but at present only 20% of electricity used in the world's data centres is from renewable sources.


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Agtech start-up Roots develops crop-temperature control system
 Boaz Wachtel is best known in Israel for founding the Green Leaf (Ale Yarok) political party, which ran for Knesset several times on a platform of legalizing cannabis. Green Leaf never passed the voter threshold and Watchtel “retired” from the party in 2006. He has now transformed his passion for green into a different kind of initiative.

Wachtel is the founder of several Israeli agriculture technology companies. His latest – Roots Sustainable Agricultural Technologies – just went public on the Australian Stock Exchange, raising a modest $5 million.

There’s nothing modest about Watchtel’s ambitions for Roots, however, which he believes will be a game-changer addressing both worldwide hunger and the impact of drought on population migration. If Watchtel’s technology had been available six years ago, when the climate change-sparked civil war first broke out in Syria, he says, “I don’t think that disaster would have occurred.”

What does Roots make that could be so revolutionary that it can stall revolutions? A seemingly simple technology that heats and cools the roots of plants, and another that can irrigate whole farms by harnessing dew.

The formal name for the latter is “irrigation by condensation” (IBC). Pipes filled with cooled water are run through crop beds. The contrast between the temperature of the cooled water in the pipe and the air outside extracts enough water through condensation to irrigate the plants. It works even in deserts or areas where there’s little rainfall but plenty of humidity, Wachtel tells ISRAEL21c.

Wachtel got the idea when he was living in the United States in the late 1980s. Another entrepreneur was doing something similar, but with seawater. The problem was that “no farmer wants seawater running on his farm,” Wachtel explains. If the pipe breaks, the crops would be ruined. “And if the farm isn’t close to the sea, pumping the water can be very expensive.”

Roots’ IBC system is standalone, with its own fresh water and electricity-cooled pipes. Eventually, Watchtel hopes to run it all by solar power. IBC was lauded as a “technology of the month” by NASA’s Tech Briefs.

While IBC is still in development, Roots’ other technology, root zone temperature optimization (RZTO), is in trials on 12 Israeli farms and three in Spain. RTZO helps plants survive harsh weather by heating their roots in the winter and cooling them in the summer.

The Guardian featured RTZO prominently in an article asking “How do you feed 9.7 billion people?”

Keeping plants at the right temperature is nothing new – that’s what greenhouses are all about. But most technologies “focus on air and temperature management, which is very wasteful, since there’s a large volume of air,” Wachtel says.

By focusing on just the roots, Wachtel’s Roots uses less energy, making it more environmentally friendly. RTZO works by inserting heat-exchanging coils into the ground.

Roots’ tests so far show great promise. RTZO has led to crop yield increases of 20 to 40 percent for strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes and basil, and up to 60% increases for lettuce.

The Australia connection

Wachtel hasn’t strayed entirely from his Green Leaf roots – both Roots’ products can be used for growing cannabis. And the two companies Wachtel started previously are both in the medical cannabis space: MMJ Phytotech, which has a market cap of $56 million, and Cresco Pharma, valued at $37 million.

MMJ and Cresco, like Roots, are publicly traded in Australia, where there is a lot of interest in Israeli agricultural technologies. Like Israel, much of Australia is arid desert.

However, the Australia connection is not just about water. The Australian Stock Exchange has been trying to expand beyond resource stocks (mining, forestry, oil exploration), Wachtel says. “As a result, they have been very open to listing startups and early-stage companies as a way to diversify the stock exchange.”

Roots began operating in 2012 within the Avital Pharma tech incubator and received seed funding from the Israel Innovation Authority (formerly the Office of the Chief Scientist).

Roots is still small – just seven people, under the leadership of Sharon Devir, who has a background in agricultural engineering.

Wachtel, the inventor, is not a farmer or even a techie. He holds a master’s degree in management and marketing from the University of Maryland.

“I’m a curious guy who reads a lot,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “And I have a passion to solve water scarcity issues.” In the early 1990s, Wachtel worked on water policy issues as a guest researcher at the Freedom House NGO.

Roots plans to sell RTZO and IBC together in a single package. “And it has to be affordable, for low-income farmers, to provide them access to water,” Watchtel stresses.

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Output: Roots Sustainable Agricultural Technologies has developed a crop-root temperature control system it said uses minimal energy. The Israeli start-up said the system increases yield by mitigating the stress brought about by extreme temperature fluctuations. The company, which recently listed on the Australian stock exchange and raised AUD5m ($3.8m) in an initial public offering, has also developed an irrigation method that relies solely on condensation.


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EU jobseekers still prefer UK even as Brexit vote damps allure
 The UK remains the most popular country among Europeans looking to work abroad, but its lead is eroding fast, according to new analysis by the world’s largest job site Indeed.

However, Britain’s lead is shrinking as Germany and Ireland storm up the league table of most popular countries for European workers

Britons remain the least likely to look for work in another EU country, but Brexit has driven a 15% increase in the number with itchy feet

Indeed research comes as official statistics confirm an exodus of EU citizens from the UK in the 12 months following the Brexit referendum

The UK remains the most popular country among Europeans looking to work abroad, but its lead is eroding fast, according to new analysis by the world’s largest job site Indeed.

Researchers analysed the online search patterns of millions of jobseekers across the EU15, and found that among those looking for work in another country, the UK remains by far the most popular choice – attracting nearly a third of all interest in the first nine months of the year.

But for all Britain’s dominance, its star has waned substantially in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote. The UK’s 31.8% share of EU15 cross-border job searches in the first nine months of 2017 is 14.7% lower than it was during the same period in 2015.

Table: Ranking of the most popular countries for EU15 jobseekers (based on each country’s share of cross-border job searches).

The analysis also suggests Britain’s loss could be its rivals’ gain. Germany, the second most popular country, saw its share of searches rise by a fifth (19.3%), while Ireland’s rose by a third (33.6%) and Luxembourg’s by a dizzying 56%.

Indeed’s data mirrors the UK’s latest official migration statistics, which show that the number of EU citizens moving to Britain fell by 19% in the 12 months following the Brexit referendum. During the same period, the number of EU citizens leaving Britain rose by 29% to 123,000.

The analysis, which highlights where people would like to work and gives a flavour of trends to come, also reveals many British-based workers are busy planning to move elsewhere in the EU.

While British job seekers considering a move abroad have traditionally been drawn mostly to English-speaking countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, between 2015 and 2017 Indeed tracked a 15.4% increase in the proportion looking for work in the EU.

Meanwhile on the other side of the coin, Ireland’s booming jobs market – and the waning appeal of Britain’s – prompted a 16.5% fall in the proportion of Irish job seekers hoping to move to Britain.

It’s a similar picture in Poland, a country which already has one million of its citizens living in the UK. Indeed’s researchers found that between 2015 and 2017 the proportion of job seekers in Poland looking for work in Britain fell by 11.4%.

Mariano Mamertino, EMEA economist at Indeed, commented: “For much of the past decade, Britain’s dynamic labour market has made it a poster boy for ambitious Europeans keen to progress their careers.

“Last year’s Brexit vote hasn’t stopped that attractiveness in its tracks, but it is clearly giving many European jobseekers pause for thought.

“So while the UK is still the most popular destination among Europeans looking to work abroad, its lead is shrinking fast. Britain’s loss could be its rivals’ gain – and Germany, France and Ireland are all attracting a greater share of the interest from upwardly mobile EU citizens.

“One more surprising aspect of the Brexit effect is the apparent outbreak of itchy feet among British jobseekers. Britain remains a net importer of talent from the EU, but the surge of interest in European roles among UK-based job seekers suggests the cross-Channel traffic is no longer just a one-way street.”

Output: The job-search patterns of European Union nationals on job site Indeed have shown that the UK remains their preferred country for overseas work. However, since 2015 - before the Brexit referendum - the proportion of jobseekers looking for work in the UK has fallen to 31.8% from 37.3%. The 14.7% contraction compares with a 19.3% surge in those preferring Germany and 33.6% for Ireland.


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Cedar develops personalised patient billing platform
 New York City-based Cedar, a startup offering patient-personalized medical billing, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Participants in the round include Founders Fund, Thrive Captial, Martin Ventures and SV Angel.

Cedar promises a smart billing system that incorporates data points collected across the overall patient payment process. Its platform uses these to inform the method of communication, messaging, and payment option that it surfaces for patients, while optimizing its selections via machine learning in pursuit of improved patient responses.

“At Cedar, we study everything from a patient’s billing history, to their level of engagement with previous communications and general payer and demographic information," Florian Otto, cofounder and CEO of Cedar, said in a statement. "Putting all of these signals together, our platform provides data-driven recommendations for providers to optimize all interactions with patients...We are excited to work with innovative, consumer-centric healthcare providers that see patient billing as an opportunity to vastly improve the patient experience and their own operations.”

Cedar’s platform is designed for hospitals, health systems, and medical groups. With it, providers are able to consolidate billing information across multiple caregivers while allowing a provider billing team to oversee these activities through a dashboard interface.

The platform can be implemented within 10 weeks and integrates with any EHR or practice management system, according to Cedar. Early tests of the system have demonstrated, on average, a 22 percent increase in collections, a 33 percent reduction in accounts receivable days, a 62 percent increase in self-serve payments, and a customer satisfaction rate of more than 90 percent.

“The consumer experience in healthcare lags behind nearly every other industry — this is painfully obvious when you look at the current patient billing process," Kareem Zaki, an investor at Thrive Capital, said in a statement. "We see Cedar doing much more than providing a Band-Aid solution to this problem. They're approaching the patient billing experience from a completely different viewpoint than other vendors, and creating a new standard for revenue cycle operations.”

Output: New York start-up Cedar aims to improve the consumer experience with its medical payment platform. Aimed at health systems, hospitals and medical groups, it incorporates data from across a patient's medical billing history, enabling providers to offer a personalised service. According to Cedar, which recently raised $13m in series A funding, implementation of the platform resulted in customer satisfaction rates of more than 90%, while collections rose by 22% and self-serve payments were up by 62%.


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Apprentice bringing AR to biopharma labs
 Jersey City, New Jersey-based Apprentice is bringing augmented reality to the realm of pharma and biotech manufacturing.

The startup recently raised $2.5 million to help it pursue its goal. The lead investor was Silverton Partners, and Hemi Ventures also participated.

In a phone interview, Apprentice cofounder and CEO Angelo Stracquatanio said the funding is the company’s seed round.

“We see it as a positive sign that the industry is moving in the direction we’d always hoped it would move in,” he said. “AR is being adopted at a commercial scale.”

Stracquatanio noted that the money will be used to expand the company’s development area, work on R&D and improve its core product.

Apprentice’s solution has three main modules, all of which run on smart glasses like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens.

The first, called Tandem, is geared toward collaboration. When an employee needs assistance from a subject matter expert, Tandem makes it possible for the pair to communicate, even if they are in different locations. Using the tool, the remote expert can see what the employee on the manufacturing floor sees and coach him or her through the issue.

Another part of the solution, Manuals, serves as the startup’s process and workflow aid. It enables users to have hands-free access to operating procedures and other tasks.

Gauge is the third piece of the puzzle and is centered on data collection and safety in the workplace. Rather than spending exorbitant amounts of time recording information, operators can use the module to gather lab and manufacturing data while performing another task.

The ultimate goal is to leverage augmented reality to improve efficiency and safety in laboratory and manufacturing environments.

“We were so inspired by Apprentice’s passion for utilizing the latest technology to offer real solutions for labs and complex manufacturers,” Mike Dodd, partner at Silverton Partners, said in a statement. “They are market leaders in using augmented reality to provide direct client benefits as a result of the users’ enhanced operational experience.”

Stracquatanio said Apprentice’s revenue model has two phases.

The first is a pilot phase, during which the company provides everything from the software to the smart glasses to a client. The Jersey City startup also offers the client with training and support throughout the lifetime of the pilot, which typically lasts between one and three months.

“If you set it and forget it, that’s not fruitful for them or us,” Stracquatanio said. “We treat it as a collaborative effort.”

After the initial phase, Apprentice utilizes a software-as-a-service model based on a per device or per user basis.

Photo: abluecup, Getty Images

Output: New Jersey-based company Apprentice aims to bring augmented reality to laboratory and manufacturing environments through its Tandem, Manuals and Gauge tools. All three tools require smart glasses. Tandem enables a remote expert to experience what a producer or employee on the factory floor sees, while Manuals offers hands-free access to operating procedures, and Gauge facilitates the collection of lab and manufacturing data. Apprentice recently raised $2.5m in seed funding from Silverton Partners, which will be used to improve core products, invest in R&D and expand the firm's work area, according to CEO Angelo Stracquatanio.


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Wales 2nd, England 18th in global recycling table
 A new Eunomia report prepared jointly with the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) reveals that the world’s leading recycling nations may be overstating the level of real recycling they are achieving.

Recycling – Who Really Leads the World? (Issue 2) is an update to the Eunomia publication (launched in March 2017) that ranked countries by reported recycling rates and then, using publicly available waste data, calculated adjusted recycling rates for the top 10 on a like-for-like basis to provide truly comparable recycling rate figures.

Although recycling rates reported by each country establishes a top three of Germany (66%), Wales (64%) and Singapore (61%) our updated report goes further to look in more detail at what is included in these reported recycling rates, and uses new research to create a revised recycling rate league table. After adjusting for differences in how different countries measure recycling rates, for example whether construction or commercial waste is included or excluded, or how ash from incineration is accounted for, a more comparable set of recycling rates can be derived. Using these adjusted rates, the top three countries are: Germany (56%), Austria (54%) and South Korea (54%) with Wales dropping into fourth place (52%).

Our in-depth knowledge of waste management practices and measurement methods in Europe has recently been used to support the development of the European Commission’s new Circular Economy Package.

Rob Gillies, Eunomia Managing Consultant and report author said:

“What’s interesting is that when ranked based on reported recycling rates, the winners are clear, whereas after making adjustments for different measurement methods the top recyclers are much closer together, so the top spot is all to play for if countries want to be ambitious.”

“It’s important to note this research has been carried out so we can identify who the real leaders in recycling are, to share best practice by shining a spotlight on what these countries are doing. We also hope that this will help progress the debate on how best to measure ‘real’ recycling, in line with the principles of the waste hierarchy, in a way that is as consistent as possible within Europe and further afield.”

Stéphane Arditi, Policy Manager on Circular Economy, Products and Waste for EEB said:

“This kind of ground-breaking research tells us what EU countries really need to do to achieve higher recycling rates, which require proper collection and recycling of biowaste. It also tells in a truly circular economy there can be no room for incineration of valuable resources that could instead be actually recycled. The fact that some countries have increased recycling rates by 35 percentage points in under 15 years shows that all member states can achieve the new EU recycling targets.”

Output: Wales is the second-best country in the world for recycling household waste, surpassed only by Germany, according to research by environmental analysts Eunomia. The report analysed recycling rates for municipal solid waste, including household plastic and packaging. New policies from the Welsh government, a zero waste target for 2050 and recycling rates of 63.8% mean that the country is likely to top the poll next year. England, with rates of 42.8%, ranks 18th globally, behind countries including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan.


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Wales 2nd, England 18th in global recycling table
 Wales ranks second in the world for recycling household waste but England lags far behind other European countries, according to new research.

Policies brought in by the Welsh government and a target to be zero waste by 2050 have driven the country up the league table to come in just under Germany. With recycling rates of 63.8% for municipal solid waste, which includes household plastic and other packaging, Wales is set to become the world leader for recycling by next year, according to a report from the environmental analysts Eunomia.

But in England, where recycling rates have been flatlining, Michael Gove, the environment secretary, will be under pressure over rates of just 42.8%. England ranks 18th in the world, behind South Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, among others.

The report examined reported recycling rates of municipal solid waste, which is made up of everyday items that are disposed of by the public at home or on the go.

Dominic Hogg, chairman of Eunomia, said: “It’s great to see the ambition of the Welsh bearing fruit, with their recycling rates close to the top of the table. It’s embarrassing for England, which ... is standing still in terms of performance and dropping in the rankings as others continue to progress. We know that the public is concerned about the growing problem of waste, especially the way plastics are dealt with.”

Countries that made it into the top 10 had recycling rates of more than 50%. There were key themes and policies shared by those countries doing well on recycling.

These include:

Mandatory separate collection of key dry recyclable materials.Mandatory separate collection of bio waste.

Statutory targets for rates of recycling or the reduction of unrecycled waste.Pay-as-you-throw charges.Producer responsibility schemes, where producers fund the collection of key recyclables.Taxes on landfill.Deposit refund systems.

England only has two of these in place: a tax on landfill and separate collection of dry recyclable materials.

A Welsh government spokesperson said: “In the 20 years since devolution, Wales’s recycling rate has increased from just under 5% to 64%. We are well on track to meet our 70% target by 2025.

“Our success has been achieved through a comprehensive package of measures. These include statutory targets, funding, principled, progressive leadership and a firm commitment from local authorities and the Welsh public to reducing, reusing and recycling.

“We are always looking at how we can continue to improve. Earlier this year, Cabinet secretary Lesley Griffiths announced her plans to halve food waste by 2025. We are confident this is achievable thanks to the enthusiasm that exists in Wales to recycling.”

Gove has said a bottle deposit scheme is a great idea and called for views on setting one up.

But experts are concerned that with local council budgets facing further cuts and no sign of central government investment in improving recycling rates, England will continue to fail to raise levels of recycling.

The Recycling Association last week called for more responsibility throughout the supply chain to make recycling easier for the public.

Simon Ellin of the Recycling Association said: “Central government needs to put money into the system to make it work. Local authorities have been cut, they can’t afford to do a lot of the work around recycling, they aren’t doing the communicating with the public or the advertising. All that impacts on recycling rates.

“If the government is serious about waste recycling they need a coherent plan and they need to put the investment in.”

The report comes as local authorities face more challenges from an imminent ban by the Chinese government on importing household waste.

Experts say the higher cost of recycling could see some local authorities reducing collections and not collecting some plastics.

Output: Wales is the second-best country in the world for recycling household waste, surpassed only by Germany, according to research by environmental analysts Eunomia. The report analysed recycling rates for municipal solid waste, including household plastic and packaging. New policies from the Welsh government, a zero waste target for 2050 and recycling rates of 63.8% mean that the country is likely to top the poll next year. England, with rates of 42.8%, ranks 18th globally, behind countries including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan.


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Online learning continues to expand in Arab world
 In the past 10 years alone, tech invaded classrooms and played a crucial role in disrupting the way knowledge is consumed worldwide.

Benchmarking this with what’s happening in the edtech scene regionally, Arab innovators and educators are not standing still one bit. Success stories like online educational platform Rwaq, which has 1.9 million enrolments in 300 courses since it started four years ago, or big initiatives like The One Million Arab Coders launched by HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum to train one million young Arabs on coding, reveal that the MENA region is well on its way to becoming an edtech leader.

The education industry started evolving much quicker following the era of the 3 Ws and online access to education got much easier. The launch of Khan Academy in 2006 was a leap towards a new way for consuming educational content called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). This online platform for educational tools offered people the chance to learn about different subjects outside of the typical classroom. Perhaps, this idea was an evolution of the 1953-televised courses that were introduced by the University of Houston.

It was from then onwards that many platforms started to find a safe ground to launch and flourish and even pivot.

In 2002, MIT started its OpenCourseWare project, which offered online course materials from its undergraduate curriculums for free to everyone.

In 2010, the first iPad was introduced to the market and adopted in a number of schools in the UK.

Global online courses platforms like Udacity and Coursera (2012) were launched to bridge the knowledge gap. The first raised $105 million in 2015, with a $1 billion valuation making it a unicorn company. Coursera, on the other hand, raised $64 million in June 2017, at an $800 million valuation.

Bill Gates visiting Khan Academy's offices. (Image via Khan Academy)

While we are yet to see such MOOC valuations in the Arab region, a number of initiatives are playing a leading role in educating people, in Arabic.

In 2014, Queen Rania Foundation for education development launched Edraak in Jordan, a MOOC platform that offers a variety of courses in Arabic.

Today, the platform has 1,400 new registered learners a day and is reaching over 1.4 million Arabic speaking learners from all over the world, and over two million fans on social media channels, according to Shireen Yacoub, CEO of Edraak. The platform features over 76 different courses in various topics. Edraak joined forces with Google.org to create an online educational platform for Arabic open educational resources (OERs), targeting K-12 students and their educators across the Middle East and North Africa region, said Yacoub.

“Today, an estimated 13 million MENA children, equivalent to 40 percent of the school age population, are missing out on education because of conflict and displacement. The refugee crisis has also strained existing education systems in host countries, like Jordan and Lebanon that have taken in large numbers of refugee students, compromising the quality of education offered to both local and refugee children,” she explained.

The content of the new platform will include videos, automated assessment tools, mini-games, and reading material.

Saudi Arabia’s Rwaq is one of the largest MOOC platforms in the Arab region. With 1.9 million enrolments in 300 courses since it started four years ago, Rwaq has been focusing on providing high quality Arabic content. “By far, technology courses are the most demanded. We had 50,000 enrolments in Java courses taught by Dr. Mohath Alkhalaf,” said cofounder Fouad Alfarhan. “It’s becoming clearer that nanodegrees/specialization programs are the most promising model. The initial model where student could take MOOC course and convert it into university hours is not working that well,” he commented on the evolution of MOOC usages, hinting at its role in building employees capacities. “The collaboration between MOOC platforms and corporates to create online educational programs is working well. Corporates might find MOOC platforms the best place to prepare their future employees or current ones.”

Perhaps this move is what the region needs, when over 22 percent of companies already use MOOCs to develop employees, added Yacoub pointing at the knowledge gaps currently seen across the MENA.

In order to roll out nanodegree programs, Alfarhan told Wamda that he is in the process of signing a sponsorship deal with an international organization and hoping the program will officially launch in December 2017.

Under the same goal, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in Saudi Arabia launched Doroob, in partnership with MOOC provider edX, to offer entrepreneurs the necessary tools to build sustainable businesses.

Nadrus and Dawrat are other MOOC examples from the Gulf. Dawrat offers movable educational workshops in different locations in Kuwait. The last one was at 360 Mall. “People would sign up online or even on the spot,” explained Dawrat cofounder Mohammad Al-Suraye. “Each room accommodated around 20 people. We had 15 workshops over three days and over 400 people overall.”

One of Dawrat's movable workshops at 360 mall. (Image via Dawrat)

Nadrus as a platform has served more than 600,000 learners over the past four years, with more than 200 Arabic courses (public and private) and serves over 100,000 registered users, according to cofounder and CEO Ahmad Fahad Al-Shagra.

When asked about the future vision of MOOC, Al-Shagra spoke about ‘Intajy’, their white-labeled cloud training engine, which includes personalized learning through artificial intelligence. He said that now they have colossal sums of data to teach their algorithms, and that they will be launching their gamified mobile application in Q1 2018. “SaaS is the best way ahead with Intajy leading the path in the region to empower Arabic skills training,” he added. They are working closely with ministries across the GCC region to scale their impact. “Emirates Driving Institute [...] uses Intajy.com as its official e-learning platform to deliver thousands of hours of training every month to their customers in Arabic, English, and Urdu.”

The DIY era

New tools and inventions are being put into practice to elevate the education process into a more enjoyable experience. The do-it-yourself approach started to gain traction as pocket-sized computer Raspberry Pi was launched in 2012. It included a wifi and a bluetooth connectivity, a MicroSD Card, a hard drive, and cables among other things.This kit taught the basics of computers and is used in robotics.

Award-winning startup littleBits was launched in 2011 by Lebanese-Canadian Ayah Bdeir. It is an open source library of electronic modules that snap together through magnets. It provides different types of kits, such as Star Wars Droid Inventor Kit, which topped the holiday toy list this year.

“Designers make tables and chairs, and now they’re designing DVD players and coffee makers and Nests. So they need to prototype with electronics; littleBits was a tool for prototyping. It was never really meant for kids,” explained Ayah Bdeir in an interview on how her startup changed its marketing strategy to target kids.

Serving the same purpose, The Little Engineer debuted in Beirut, Lebanon in 2009, and is now available in India, Singapore, Kenya, Nigeria and soon in the Gulf. This startup started by offering courses, kits, and workshops in science, technology, engineering, and maths to kids at their offices. Now, the startup is working with private schools in Lebanon by giving them the tools and curriculums, and is also training teachers on how to use them. This year, founder Rana El Chmaitelly started working with few public schools after getting the permission of the Ministry of Education.

“We work with a network of schools that has 20, 40, and 50 schools,” said El Chmaitelly in a chat with Wamda. Her plan is to expand within Lebanon, starting within Beirut and going to Bekaa, the Shouf and the North. “I can invest in a competition in China but that’s not my goal. I want to invest in my own country despite all the challenges. I prefer to use the money to equip a public or private school here,” she said.

Getting funds to buy the expensive material to build robots and get corporates to support education in the country are two key challenges she is currently facing. She believes the local education system is about to expire and needs to become more technologically advanced. Currently operating in the UAE, Jordan, Lebanon and soon in Kuwait, The Cosmic Dome is another example of a startup working in the edtech field. It installs domes of different sizes indoors or outdoors, to project educational subjects during events, marathons, or any national competition or activity. “The use of calculators in schools resulted in revising the math instruction methods in the 70s. I believe that the next trend will go for the immersive experiences, VR, and 3D printing,” said Mohamad Abbas, CEO of The Cosmic Dome. “The immersive experiences like the ones simulated inside a planetarium [a domed-building in which different types of data is visualized] allow learners to be immersed in the projected environment. As for the VR, I believe no student will have to physically go to school in the future as all classes would be delivered through a VR interface and it would virtually place them in an almost real classroom environment. Perhaps the most important advantage of using VR in the future would be saving the time learners take to travel to and from their schools and investing it in actual learning,” he explained.

Abbas is already working on installing his project in different schools and training teachers to use them. “Each school must have a small to average sized planetarium to fit an average of one class. The planetarium can be visited by science classes, art classes, music classes, and others.”Initiatives on a larger scale

When governments and big companies get more engaged in contributing to a better educational system, things move much quicker.

Smart Learning initiative, a program launched by HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has an ongoing partnership with Microsoft Gulf. It includes equipping over 145 schools, 3,500 teachers, and 24,000 students with Windows-enabled devices that have built-in educational apps, according to Ahmed Ameen Ashour, head of education sector at Microsoft Gulf. The latter also signed an MoU with Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) to deploy Office 365 in schools, enabling around 150,000 students and 13,000 teachers to collaborate and innovate. It will also bring Bett MEA to Abu Dhabi for the second year, to gather education leaders and stakeholders and share case studies and best practices.

Ashour believes there are three main pillars for edtech. The first being immersive learning, “with VR advancements permeating industries across the world. VR can be implemented in gamified solutions, stimulating visualizations for picture storytelling, for performing lab experiments in physics, medical, astronomy, and biology. Wearing headsets, students would be able to clearly see how a chemical reaction takes place and form a new concentrated solution or the way rats breathe and perform the respiratory activities,” he clarified. He also has high hopes in gamification methods and cloud computing, which provides students with “a digital library and relief from heavy textbooks. Quality content is yet another milestone that has ignited a new trend in the edtech industry,” Ashour added.

HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum has also launched The One Million Arab Coders initiative, to train one million young Arabs on coding.

“We expect an increase in e-learning and online training initiatives across the region simply because with online training the results are easily measurable, cheaper, and consistent from a quality perspective,” commented Al-shagra on the initiative launch. “We have seen some impressive breakthroughs in Arabic Speech Recognition from relatively small players in Jordan. Mobile learning and gamification with spaced repetition are becoming more reliable across the region.”

Her Excellency Dr. Sahar Nasr, the Minister of Investment and International Cooperation in Egypt and Higher Education Minister Khaled Abdul-Ghaffar, have recently signed a cooperation protocol to support university students studying entrepreneurship. It is part of an initiative called Fekretak Sherketak (‘Your Idea is Your Company’), which was launched in September 2017. It aims at connecting entrepreneurs with government entities and offering consultancy services and trainings. The agreement will allow university students to work in startups and receive technical training and financing.

A trip back in time

The introduction of education technology (edtech) goes back to the early twenties. The first teaching machine was patented in 1928 by Sidney Pressly. It had multiple-choice questions and moved when the student picked the right choice. In the early 1930s, IBM released an 805 test scoring machine, which was intended to read pencil marks left by students on exam papers and grade them.

In 1960, PLATO (programmed-logic for automatic teaching operations) was designed and built by the University of Illinois. It came with a television set and offered courses for students and certain local schools.

Between 1961 and 1968, a new program called The Flying Classroom started broadcasting on Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction as part of an educational program given to schools back then. Speak & Spell, a small electronic device with a visual display, came to life in 1978. It was the first of three-educational toys series: Speak & Read and Speak & Math. The toy helped kids aged up to seven years to learn spelling and pronouncing over 200 common misspelled words.

Also in 1978, Apple, which was already two years old, supplied Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium organization with 500 Apple Computers II in order to distribute them to schools. In 1981, BBC Microcomputer Systems was released. It consisted of a series of microcomputers mainly focusing on education, and was adopted by many schools in the UK. Ten years after, in 1991, the worldwide web era began on a global scale, and also spread to become a primary education tool.

It will take years for schools and universities to be entirely disrupted by technology, because digital transformation drastically changes the way they operate. It also touches upon the mindset of teachers and people in charge and how they are able to change kids’ mindset through technology. This means installing computers at schools would not be enough if students did not focus on the required skill sets. Yet, emerging countries regard this transformation as a competitive edge. We might not get rid of all school subjects any time soon, like Finland intends to do, but we’re making small steady steps towards that goal.

Output: Online education is booming in the Arab-speaking world, with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) playing a key role for both youngsters and adults. Edraak, which reaches 1.4 million students worldwide, has partnered with Google to launch a platform aimed at helping the 13 million refugee children across the Middle East and North Africa. Meanwhile, companies including Saudi Arabian platform Rwaq, as well as rivals Nadrus and Dawrat, are offering MOOCs which allow companies to further develop their employees and fill gaps in education or skills training.


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Cancers in human tissue detected using electric currents
 In a study published recently in Angewandte Chemie, researchers demonstrated that an imaging technique called scanning electrochemical microscopy could become a very useful medical tool. Rather than having to use additional chemicals like dyes or fluorescent markers to get a good look at tissue, this method uses electrochemical probes to detect natural biomolecules around the tissue.

In this study, the researchers used soft microelectrodes that were brushed gently across tissue samples. While it moved across them, it measured the electrical current produced by certain chemicals in the tissues to get an idea of the physical structure of that tissue as well as its composition. The team provided three separate demonstrations of this technique's use. In the first, it scanned mouse livers to show that a certain type of nanoribbon that's being studied as a potential drug delivery mechanism can be distributed throughout the liver. In the second, the probes measured hemoglobin proteins to get a full image of a mouse heart (the right side of the image above). And in another experiment, the researchers used the technique to show that it can accurately differentiate healthy human tissue from cancerous tissue.

In the future, the researchers would like to use this method to not only detect cancerous cells but also destroy them. "We are perfectly capable of using electrochemistry to kill cancer cells on microscope slides and in petri dishes," Hubert Girault, an author of the study, said in a statement, "but doing so in thick tissue is another story."

Output: Researchers have discovered using scanning electrochemical microscopy can help in distinguishing cancerous tissue from healthy organs, according to a study in Angewandte Chemie. The paper revealed that brushing microelectrodes gently over thick tissue enabled the team to measure the electric currents produced by chemicals in the tissue, giving an idea of its structure. Study author Hubert Girault said it was possible to kill cancer cells using electrochemistry in a petri dish, but "doing so in thick tissue is another story".


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Meat tax ‘inevitable’ within a decade says $4tn investor network
 “Sin taxes” on meat to reduce its huge impact on climate change and human health look inevitable, according to analysts for investors managing more than $4tn of assets.

The global livestock industry causes 15% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and meat consumption is rising around the world, but dangerous climate change cannot be avoided unless this is radically curbed. Furthermore, many people already eat far too much meat, seriously damaging their health and incurring huge costs. Livestock also drive other problems, such as water pollution and antibiotic resistance.

A new analysis from the investor network Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (Fairr) Initiative argues that meat is therefore now following the same path as tobacco, carbon emissions and sugar towards a sin tax, a levy on harmful products to cut consumption. Meat taxes have already been discussed in parliaments in Germany, Denmark and Sweden, the analysis points out, and China’s government has cut its recommended maximum meat consumption by 45% in 2016.

“If policymakers are to cover the true cost of human epidemics like obesity, diabetes and cancer, and livestock epidemics like avian flu, while also tackling the twin challenges of climate change and antibiotic resistance, then a shift from subsidisation to taxation of the meat industry looks inevitable,” said Jeremy Coller, the founder of Fairr and the chief investment officer at the private equity firm Coller Capital. “Far-sighted investors should plan ahead for this day.”

Maria Lettini, director of Fairr, said: “As implementation of the Paris climate agreement progresses we’re highly likely to see government action to reduce the environmental impact of the global livestock sector. On the current pathway we may well see some form of meat tax emerge within five to 10 years.”

Nations begin to implement sin taxes as consensus forms over the harm caused by the product, the analysis notes, and today more than 180 jurisdictions tax tobacco, more than 60 tax carbon emissions, and at least 25 tax sugar.

The first global analysis of meat taxes done in 2016 found levies of 40% on beef, 20% on dairy products and 8.5% on chicken would save half a million lives a year and slash climate warming emissions. Proposals in Denmark suggested a tax of $2.70 per kilogram of meat.

Meat taxes are often seen as politically impossible but research by Chatham House in 2015 found they are far less unpalatable to consumers than governments think. It showed people expect governments to lead action on issues that are for the global good, but that awareness of the damage caused by the livestock industry is low. Using meat tax revenues to subsidise healthy foods is one idea touted to reduce opposition.

“It’s only a matter of time before agriculture becomes the focus of serious climate policy,” said Rob Bailey at Chatham House. “The public health case will likely strengthen government resolve, as we have seen with coal and diesel. It’s hard to imagine concerted action to tax meat today, but over the course of the next 10 to 20 years, I would expect to see meat taxes accumulate.”

Marco Springmann, at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food at the University of Oxford, said: “Current levels of meat consumption are not healthy or sustainable. The costs associated with each of those impacts could approach the trillions in the future. Taxing meat could be a first and important step.”

The need for a high meat tax could be reduced if breakthrough technologies emerge to drastically cut the emissions from livestock, said Lettini, but none exist today. Another, more promising option is the nascent but fast-growing industry in plant-based meat alternatives, such as the meat-free Impossible burger. Bill Gates has invested, and major meat and dairy companies are now piling in with investments and acquisitions.

“There are huge opportunities in the market,” said Lettini. “If we can start replacing meat protein with plant-based protein that has the same look, taste and feel as meat, where real red-blooded meat eaters are happy to dig into a burger that is plant-based, we are changing the world.”

Output: “Sin taxes” to limit the impact of meat consumption on climate change and human health are likely to be introduced within the next 10 years, according to analysis for the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative, whose investors manage over $4tn in assets. The livestock sector, which is seeing meat consumption increase worldwide, causes 15% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Excessive meat consumption also contributes to issues such as water pollution and antibiotic resistance. Denmark, Germany and Sweden have already considered meat taxes, while China’s government decreased its recommended meat consumption by 45% last year.


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Apple R&D chief reports on progress with self-driving car tech
 After remaining tight-lipped for years, Apple is now more than eager to share how much progress it's making on self-driving car technology. AI research director Ruslan Salakhutdinov made a presentation this week that revealed more of what the company's autonomous driving team has been up to. Some of the talk was familiar, but there were a few new examples of how far the fledgling project had come.

To start, Apple has crafted a system that uses onboard cameras to identify objects even in tricky situations, such as when raindrops cover the lens. It can estimate the position of a pedestrian even if they're hidden by a parked car. Other additions included giving cars direction through simultaneous localization and mapping, creating detailed 3D maps using car sensors and decision-making in urgent situations (say, a wayward pedestrian).

It's still not certain if or how Apple will commercialize its self-driving know-how. At the moment, its next goal is to produce driverless employee shuttles. The company isn't currently expected to sell its own cars, but licensing its work to others would be unusual when Apple is well-known for preferring to develop everything in-house.

The talk in itself is notable. Apple has been slowly opening the kimono on its AI research, but it hasn't been clear on just how much it was willing to discuss. Salakhutdinov's chat shows that it's willing to offer at least some kind of consistent openness rather than maintaining its legendary secrecy. Not that it has much of a choice. Apple has struggled to attract AI talent in part because its secretive approach has been unappealing for researchers used to receiving academic and industry recognition. Presentations like this could keep Apple's AI team in the spotlight and reel in scientists who'd otherwise go to Facebook, Google or tech giants.

Output: In an uncharacteristically open move, Apple has outlined its progress regarding self-driving car technology. At a recent presentation, AI research director Ruslan Salakhutdinov discussed onboard cameras that estimate the position of pedestrians hidden behind parked cars, as well as car sensors that constantly develop detailed 3D maps, providing direction to cars through simultaneous localisation and mapping. Apple's secrecy has contributed to its recent difficulties in attracting top AI researchers, who are accustomed to the industry recognition they would gain at companies such as Facebook and Google. This move towards a more open approach is perhaps a recognition of this fact.