Hope everyone’s enjoying the first fall breeze!👋 As it has been the case the past 18 months, September feels like it just rushed by.
Analytics, Digital, Design In Action
A Toast to Going Public
Toast, the restaurant management software and hardware provider, went public at a valuation of $30B. While the IPO market has been hot through 2021, Toast is a bit different as it’s not a simple SaaS or payments provider. Rather, it tackles the difficult, near-unprofitable restaurants industry.
Toast’s initial product a decade ago focused on mobile payments, allowing consumers to pay for meals from their devices. However, the point-of-sale systems at restaurants made integrations difficult, if not impossible, at that time. To compound the problem, VCs have abandoned hope on the sector, considering it was fragmented, labor intensive, and had low margins and budget pools to begin with.
Yet, to circumvent the restaurant industry’s troubles, Toast decided to rebuild the entire stack, from hardware to software. Ironically, since Toast was largely ignored by Silicon Valley VCs, it was able to escape the ‘grow at all costs’ notion and instead bide their time pursuing profitable, sustainable growth.
While COVID-19 has hammered the restaurant industry, Toast showed up with a suite of options that most upscale eateries had never considered. As with most industries, the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of restaurants, and Toast is a prime player in this move.
Climate Change Tipping Point - Unveil sooner than you think
We have been talking about Climate Change for a while and many large corporations have established funds on combating climate changes. Chris Bauch, a professor at University of Waterloo recently co-authored a research paper reporting on the new deep-learning algorithm, which assesses the thresholds beyond which rapid or irreversible climate change happens through hybridizing AI and mathematical theories of tipping points, accomplishing more than either method could on its own. The algorithm could act as an early warning system against runaway climate change. The further discovery on how AI learns from the tipping functions is yet to come.
Sorry, TLDR! How about AI-powered summarization
On average, most visitors to an online publication only spend 15 seconds and read about 20% of materials. OpenAI, the famous AI research laboratory, developed an AI model that summarizes articles of any length. We can see this application in large document-heavy corporations (such as software documentation), where employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day looking for job related information. Of course, the new model is built on the previous researches, such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google Brain and startups like Primer.
For all data science enthusiasts who want to access the research papers and codes, click on these embedded links above for details. You are welcome!
Twitter Likes Some Bitcoin
Twitter will let users send and receive tips using Bitcoin as part of a broader push to help users make money from the service. In addition, it is planning to support authentication for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, by letting people connect their crypto wallets. “NFT authentication will come in the form of a badge, shown on profile pictures, marking the owner’s NFT as authentic.”
Twitter has been working to improve its creator economy and this latest announcement is a clear extension of that, while also doubling as an extension of its blockchain ambitions. No secret Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is a big fan of crypto.
Fight COVID19 - Drug Synergy Discovery through Deep Learning
The past 20 months of the COVID-19 global pandemic highlights the acute need of developing therapeutics against rising healthcare concerns. Besides vaccinations, researchers and scientists are working on understanding multiple drugs’ interaction and their impacts on potency. MIT researchers joined the Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health in identifying the right synergistic drug combinations for SARS-CoV-2, and published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The model developed by this team can also be used in combating other diseases like aforementioned cancers and cardiovascular disease to maximize potency while decreasing side effects.
Parental Supervision Comes Before Kids Version
It is not a surprise that Instagram aims to capture the gen Z traffic that flows to apps like TikTok, but Instagram is pausing the development of Instagram Kids (the development started in early March this year). Instead, Instagram focuses on developing parental supervision tools to persuade us that Instagram is safe for kids.
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