Changing consumer and merchant habits are creating opportunities for logistics companies—if they can cater to new needs and meet more exacting standards.While growth of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market has accelerated since the mid-2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic has propelled it into an new phase. From 2016 to 2021, the total value of e-commerce sales grew fivefold, or 40 percent, annually. A...

Michigan-based battery startup Our Next Energy (ONE) said it closed a $300 million Series B funding round that takes the three-year-old company’s valuation to $1.2 billion.The latest round, led by investors Franklin Templeton and Fifth Wall, makes Our Next Energy one of the most valuable privately held battery companies in the United States.ONE is delivering prototype versions of its Aries I b...

The building could generate electrical energy thanks to its rotation.As engineering reaches unimaginable heights of knowledge and expertise, the depictions of the future that seem out of sci-fi movies seem to be more feasible than ever. In such a project, the Dubai skyline could get a futuristic taste of its own thanks to Turkish architect Hayri Atak’s skyscraper concept which is designed to p...

On average, there are 250 babies born every minute around the world. This adds up to over 130 million new human beings entering the world every year.Then it’s no surprise that the world’s population, which now stands at a whopping 8 billion, has more than tripled since the mid-20th century.This graphic by Truman Du uses December 2022 population data from the UN and summaries from the French I...

2023 consumer behavior tracker for the consumer products and retail industries.In last year’s first edition of our annual research series, What matters to today’s consumer, we found that consumer sentiment and expectations had shifted dramatically over the preceding 18 months. In this year’s edition, we see many of the same trends persisting – for example, consumers still want sustainable p...

Apple was granted a patent for a multi-layered flip phone. On Thursday, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that related to a unique protective crack-resistant cover layer structure for future foldable devices such as an iPhone (flip phone), iPad (hybrid laptop), Macs and TV.Apple's invention is focused on correcting display cracking issues found on so...

We break down the generative AI landscape across funding trends, top-valued startups, most active VCs, and more.The buzz around generative AI — which refers to AI technologies that generate entirely new content, from lines of code to images to human-like speech — has reached a fever pitch.The tech news cycle has been dominated by applications like ChatGPT, a chatbot that tallied up 1M users i...

OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, has released a free tool that it says is meant to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs.” It warns the classifier is “not fully reliable” in a press release and “should not be used as a primary decision-making tool.” According to OpenAI, it can be useful in trying to determine whether someone is trying to pass o...

A new documentary sheds light on the fascinating manufacturing process behind Japanese manhole covers, which are cast in sand and painted by hand.Let’s talk about manhole covers. Every city in the world has them, yet no one ever pays attention to the ugly, stinking, rusty metal plates, unless they’re comically misaligned with road markings—or they get blown off by a sewer geyser.These metal...