#10 - Wellness and Nutrition
Covid19 continues to show how restaurants and hospitality businesses are adapting to personalized meals and subscription boxes. Healthy and hearty meals will continue to be integrated with services such as Apple Health as the pandemic rages and as we learn more about how we can prevent inflammation and other conditions that could worsen any infection.
Jamieson Vitamins recently joined forces with several Canadian brands including Toronto's Honey Bee Meals, Montreal's Jenny's Food Prep, and Vancouver's Fed to offer consumers immune-focused meals and supplements for all of October. Donations to Food Banks Canada will be made for every order placed throughout October.
#09 - Prefab Housing, Digital Manufacturing & Location-independent living.
The Anywhere House accelerates the trend of modular, pay-as-you-grow housing. It is an interesting offering as you can start with a very small space and as your life situation changes, you can add modules or move them around. With minimal construction on site and with delivery by truck, servicing and components would be accurate and provide almost-instant gratification for the consumer.
#08 - Home Office for the long run.
Amazon's eero has been updated with better range and handling of multiple internet-connected devices. The nature of work has shifted and families will look to enhance connectivity and device management. A concern is how much screen time we are willing to trade off as we remain closer to home.
#07 - Healthcare continues to be king.
Lewis Hilsenteger from Unbox Therapy recently reviewed Apple's new face mask that they have designed for their staff. What caught my eye is the DNA of the company in every detail of the new product. It remains to be seen if they would open source the design and use their core competency of scaling manufacturing and supply chain delivery for a world wide pandemic and beyond.
Apple can (and should).
#06 - Decolonization
Google has removed imagery associated with the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park at the request of The Anangu People. One small step in creating respect for Indigenous groups.
#05 - Scale
I have deep respect and admiration for the work of the Design Team at Kurzgesagt. They have an incredible way of sharing concise information with succinct messaging and beautiful imagery.
Their latest work helps us understand how big we are and how small we actually are. Their first iOS app around this content is also amazing and provides a way for content creators to reimagine merchandise and monetization.
#4 - Drones
Another Amazon company, ring, has released a new indoor home monitoring system that has a wireless camera in a drone.
Do I like the privacy hot potato (and history if how ring data is shared without my knowledge? NO.
Do I want one? YES!
#3 - Human Adaptation & Climate Change
While we still have oxygen-making machines, a.k.a. trees, Salo Sciences has begun mapping every tree in California. Every. Single. Tree.
The good use of Artificial Intelligence and imagery from Planet (the company) proves we can use our technological advances for good. Planet images the entire terrestrial surface of the earth every day in high resolution.
#2 - Humans Beyond Earth
The development of Starship continues in Boca Chica, Texas. Prototype Serial Number 8 is due to be tested with a 15km flight soon. What I find most fascinating is the residual capability of the system for freight/ cargo anywhere on earth in under one hour. This will be a massive economic impact for the countries in the South Pacific and New Zealand could play a massive role as the air space of NZ is the size of Continental Africa (~32 million square kilometers).
#1 - Embeddables and the frontier of Wearables
The new Apple Watch Series 6 is part of an ecosystem of wearables and sensors that continue to improve in computation, perception of safety and clinical accuracy. Whilst the blood oxygen feature is not backed by the FDA, it marks the beginning of what we are comfortable keeping on the outside of our bodies and that we consciously know is measuring how our biological machines are doing.
Cardiovascular health and the millions of people who are left with COVID19 effects will perhaps become a growing population who'd be open to the idea of more invasive sensors - embeddable hardware and implants. We will continue to see this monitoring and I find it necessary to build wisdom and become better elders of how we want our data to be used.