Tag: manufacturing

Remote work can’t change everything until we fix this $80 billion problem

Biden’s infrastructure plan could transform broadband in the U.S.

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People in Washington have been trying to fix the country’s digital divide for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing the stars into alignment for real action on broadband access and affordability in 2021. COVID-19 kept tens of millions of office workers and schoolchildren at home, with a broadband line becoming their primary connection to the outside world. A Pew study in March found that 31% of Americans are “almost constantly online.” Meanwhile, 77 million Americans lack adequate internet service at home, says public interest group Free Press, and just two-thirds of people in the nation’s bottom income bracket can access the internet from home. Congress has already included $3.2 billion in emergency funding for broadband access in the stimulus bill this year. But the big show for broadband stimulus will come in the bill that emerges from President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan–the American Jobs Plan . The plan proposes to fund all kinds of infrastructure, among them $174 billion for electric vehicles, $50 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research, and $100 billion to build out broadband networks. Read More …

Why the Air Force has its own venture capital fund

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The Defense Department is trying to renew its once robust relationship with Silicon Valley to find the technologies needed to confront 21st-century threats. The Air Force is taking the novel approach of establishing a venture capital firm within its ranks that locates, invests in, and opens doors for promising defense startups. AFVentures is a division of an Air Force technology acquisition and development group called AFWerx (the AF stands for Air Force and Werx is shorthand for “work project”) established in 2017. AFWerx is something like the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) within the DOD, which began looking into the private sector for promising defense technologies back in 2015. For many years the DOD has relied chiefly on technologies developed either within the government or by a small group of large contractors such as Boeing or Raytheon. There’s a growing belief within defense circles that to address the new nontraditional and cyberwarfare threats on the horizon, the U.S. needs to tap into the cutting-edge innovation happening outside those universes. Sidestepping the ‘Valley of Death’ One of the biggest things AFVentures does is help small startups survive the brutal process of qualifying for a defense contract. The DOD’s procurement process is famous for its complexity and slowness. It’s a five-phase affair that starts with technology analysis, then moves to product prototyping, then engineering and manufacturing, then production and deployment, and ends with operations and support—and that’s if the project isn’t rejected or starved of funding. It’s a mind-numbingly labyrinthine system clogged with red tape and paperwork. Larger contractors have large staffs of people to wade through the process, but smaller tech companies face a real challenge managing all the work. That means a smaller startup might do a successful pilot project for a branch of the military but then parish while waiting for a sustainable long-term contract to materialize. Read More …

‘Roblox’ isn’t just a gaming company. It’s also the future of education

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Roblox , which recently made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, has quickly become one of the most valuable video game companies in the world.  As I write this article, Roblox has effortlessly overtaken household video game names such as Take-Two (maker of Grand Theft Auto ) and Electronic Arts (EA) (maker of Battlefield and FIFA ) in terms of market cap, while only making a fraction of the incumbents’ revenues and none of their profits. And there is good reason for this change in pecking order. Unlike Take-Two and EA, Roblox is not just a gaming company. It is a virtual playground for nearly 200 million monthly users, with two-thirds of those users being of school-going age. Read More …

The clothes we wear are about to undergo a wild digital revolution

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Imagine an article of clothing that could tell your washing machine how to keep its colors from fading. Imagine a piece of clothing that could warm your body in the winter and cool it down in the summer. Imagine wearing clothes that weren’t designed last year, or last season, but yesterday, in response to that day’s buying patterns. Imagine being able to fully customize every article of clothing in your wardrobe for the same cost as mass-produced items. And imagine a clothing industry that could do all of this while significantly reducing emissions and retaining most of its workforce. Thanks to new advancements in manufacturing, you won’t have to imagine forever. While the clothing we wear today is largely designed, manufactured, and sold in the same way it was 100 years ago, what we wear is expected to change dramatically in the not-so-distant future, thanks to advancements in manufacturing technology. Read More …

What the science says about 7 common COVID-19 vaccine myths

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This story is part of Doubting the Dose, a series that examines anti-vaccine sentiment and the role of misinformation in supercharging it.  Read more here . The Pfizer-BioNtech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccines may be miracles of modern medicine, but they were also developed in a remarkably short time frame, amid a sea of misinformation and conspiracy theories. So it’s understandable that some may feel initially hesitant about getting vaccinated. While there is an immediate need to get many people vaccinated quickly in order to reduce infection rates and the chance that further dangerous mutations will occur, convincing the vaccine-hesitant may take time. Best practices for talking about the importance of COVID-19 vaccination include genuinely listening to the concerns that others express and only providing answers you know to be true. If you’re unsure about a fact, it’s fine to say so and to direct the person to a reputable source or do more research yourself. With all the misinformation floating around, we rounded up seven common vaccine myths that may dissuade people from getting vaccinated. Here’s what the science tells us about the COVID-19 vaccines. Myth: The vaccines were rushed to market, so we don’t know their long-term impacts Read More …