Trends on our Radar - Feb 2013

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Trends on our Radar

Our regular pick of five hot technology areas and some of the leading innovative companies leading the way (February 2013) Produced by our Open Innovation and Technology Scouting team

Five Emerging Technology Areas and their Leading Innovators

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Biomimicry

Life Logging

Ephemeral Messaging

Smart Product Labels

Meat Analogues


Biomimicry Short Term Trend

Over the last 3.6 billion years, nature has gone through a process of trial and error to refine living organisms, processes, and materials to operate in an efficient and sustainable way. Innovators seeking sustainable solutions to the technology challenges we face are therefore increasingly looking to nature for inspiration.


Example Innovators

Maplebird, UK As the size of aircraft become smaller the traditional means of creating lift becomes less effective. Nature's solution to this problem is flapping wings, and MapleBird has developed an engine that can power flapping wing flight at the insect scale. Applications include UAVs for military and civilian services, and personal drones.

Autonomic Materials, IL, USA In nature, damage to an organism elicits a healing response. Autonomic Materials applies this concept to synthetic materials to create ‘self-healing’ coatings, paints and adhesives for environments where corrosion is a risk. These contain microcapsules that release self-healing agents when damaged.

NBD Nano, USA Mimicking the Namib Desert Beetle, NBD’s technology can be used to enhance water condensation on surfaces and allows water harvesting from the air in the most arid regions of the world.


Life Logging Medium Term Trend

Life logging is the perpetual recording and documentation of your day-to-day life through the use of electronic devices. Primitive forms of life logging are already common, thanks to widespread use of mobile phones with video and photo capabilities, but the near future promises the capacity for cheap and convenient methods of capturing your entire life, second by second.


Archify, Austria Archify is a web browser plugin that works away in the background recording all your online activity. All the web pages you browse, your social network streams (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and emails are stored as a unified searchable archive. The service also allows users to draw insights from their archive.

Livescribe , NY, USA Livescribe has developed a WiFi enabled pen that captures and digitizes hand written notes and drawings along with any conversations that accompanied them, and then backs them up online.

Example Innovators

Memoto, Sweden Memoto is developing a postage-stamp-sized wearable camera to document every moment of your life. Presented as a ‘memory preserver and enhancer’, the 5-megapixel camera takes a stream of shots every 30 seconds which are automatically saved and can then be viewed and managed via a companion App.


Ephemeral Messaging Medium Term Trend

As more communication happens online, people are under increasing pressure to use social media to promote their projected self at the expense of communicating in a real way. This is combined with worries about unflattering pictures or embarrassing status updates coming back to haunt them in future. Tapping into these concerns are services that create messages and communications that are designed not to be permanent.


Example Innovators

Wickr, CA, USA Wickr lets users decide how long their messages live. When they create a text - picture, voice or video – a time limit is set for how long it will survive. The aim is to put users in control of their own communication, not companies or governments. Only the recipient's device can read the message, before it disappears. Early adopters of the service are high profile figures such as celebrities and professions in fields such as banking, medicine and law enforcement.

Snapchat, CA, USA More than 60 million photos or messages are sent each day through the Snapchat App and then, after they are viewed for a few seconds, they disappear. The service lowers the committal value of sharing a photo, promoting a more real you to emerge out of the fleeting composite. The service has so far been embraced mainly by 13-25 yr olds.


Smart Product Labels Near Term Trend

Smart product labels are increasingly being used by companies to help enhance their supply chain monitoring, their ability to market products, and also to provide clearer information to consumers.


Example Innovators

Timestrip, UK Timestrip's low cost temperature monitoring indicators can be used to monitor temperature-sensitive shipments in the food, pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors, among others. The labels are triggered by breaches of acceptable temperature ranges and also record the duration of those breaches.

ZBD Displays, UK ZBD's electronic shelf labels and software remove the need for traditional paper labelling, allowing retailers to bring dynamic price and product information to the shelf. Benefits include the ability for retailers to trade as dynamically and responsively in-store as they can online.

UWI Label, UK UWI Label has developed a container label that detects when product s (in sectors such as medicine, aerospace, cosmetics, food & drink) may no longer be safe to use after having being opened.


Meat Analogues Medium Term Trend

Although meat replacements have previously attracted industry and consumer attention, their sensory qualities have generally been inferior to the original. However, these issues are increasingly being overcome by the development of analogues with improved texture, juiciness, appearance and aroma.


Example Innovators

Beyond Meat, CA, USA Founded in 2010, Beyond Meat is focused on replacing animal protein with plant protein where doing so creates nutritional value at lower cost. The company is developing new plant protein products, such plant-based strips that have the convenience, taste, and tenderness of real chicken.

Meatless, Netherlands Fat has an important taste function and gives meat its juiciness and a characteristic mouth-feel. Meatless is a replacement for fat in meat products that enables food producers to reduce fat by 50% without losing taste or quality. The products’ juiciness remains, even with extremely low fat levels.

LikeMeat, Germany LikeMeat is a project co-ordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute to develop meat analogues with qualities so close to the original they will be capable of widespread consumer acceptance.


Thank you www.ventureradar.com @venture_radar Andrew Thomson, Director Email: [email protected]

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Trends on our Radar - Feb 2013

Technology

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