Who knew Polaroid and espresso were unlikely companions? This concept rather cleverly combines the two into the ‘ultimate coffee machine for amateurs’. If Polaroid brought great retro photography (and photo development) to the masses, the Polaroid Express does the same for instant coffee. Plus, can we just take a second to appreciate how clever the name Polaroid Express is?! (as a play on Pol...

The next breakthrough to take the AI world by storm might be 3D model generators. This week, OpenAI open sourced Point-E, a machine learning system that creates a 3D object given a text prompt. According to a paper published alongside the code base, Point-E can produce 3D models in one to two minutes on a single Nvidia V100 GPU.Point-E doesn’t create 3D objects in the traditional sense. Rather...

To avoid disintermediation and realize the potential benefits, banks need to decide now what their investment posture is and how far they want to engage.Digital currencies hold the promise of programmability, enriched data, lower costs, and faster payments. Banks, governments, and fintechs are beginning to deploy the currencies in different payment situations.We foresee that digital and traditi...

From claustrophobic telephone closets to high-design collaboration pods, the market for private work booths is exploding.Before the pandemic, an estimated 70% of U.S. companies worked out of open plan offices. Their employees, by and large, hated them. With few, if any, walls separating them, workers were constantly distracted by each other’s noise. And when there was a need to get away from t...

Along with its use on eyeglasses (lens at right), the coating could also be utilized on windows, mirrors or optical sensors.While anti-fog sprays work to a certain extent, warming a glass surface is a better way of keeping it fog-free. A new coating material is designed to do so, and it utilizes light-absorbing gold nanoparticles instead of electricity.Most of the anti-fog sprays used on things...

It’s been a tough year for crypto, and venture capital activity confirms it. The collapse of FTX in November was the latest and most shocking in a series of closures of key market players this year,including Celsius, Voyager and BlockFi — that have shaken investor sentiment and wiped out $1.5 trillion in market capitalization from cryptocurrency space.Blockchain venture capital funding has be...

The first smartwatches amazed many people, especially tech-savvy ones that saw science fiction becoming a reality right before their very eyes. That excitement, however, was a bit short-lived when reality did finally set in, calling into question the purpose and usability of the new type of device. It has been years since the first generation launched, but smartwatches still exhibit one particu...

Redaptive, an energy efficiency startup, announced on Monday it raised $200 million from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board shortly after it scrapped plans to go public. The San Francisco-based company works with businesses to better conserve energy where it’s not needed, lowering utilities costs and making it easier for companies to meet various state- and country-wide goals to reduce t...

Architecture studios Grimshaw, HWKN, WHY and Farshid Moussavi have partnered with metaverse company Pax.world to create a series of virtual hubs informed by the ancient Silk Road.Each architecture studio designed a metaserai – a concept referring to caravanserai, which were roadside inns on the Silk Road – where users of the metaverse can trade, attend cultural events, and network.Pax. world...