The Innovator

#India’s antitrust body says Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging “in abusive conduct and practices”, according to a July 12 Reuters report. The finding, which could pave the way for big #AppStore changes in India, follows the announcement in June by the European Commission that formally accused Apple’s App Store of violating the EU’s new #DigitalMarketsAct. Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of the European Union, #Japan has now passed a law that will restrict Apple and Google from blocking third-party app stores for Japanese users on their platforms. The legislation is expected to come into force by the end of 2025 and aims to reduce app prices and create a more equitable market by forcing the tech giants to compete with smaller challengers. All three developments look likely to upend the half a trillion dollar global app market, ushering in more competition and innovation at a time when a growing number of corporates want to launch platform businesses and are considering opening their own app stores. “The opportunities for companies, for developers, for consumers and enterprise customers are very big,” says Paulo Trezentos 🔜 ChinaJoy, Founder and CEO of Portugal-based Aptoide, an alternative app distribution and payment processing platform, with over 430 million users, 100,000 developers, one billion downloads a year and around five million transactions. Aptoide in June launched the first free iPhone App Store alternative in Europe, after the EU forced Apple to allow the installation of alternative app stores on Apple devices. Trezentos was a speaker on a July 11 panel about the app economy moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief during an online Platform Leaders conference organized by Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier. The event brought together leading entrepreneurs, policy makers, academics, investors and practitioners to exchange insights and best practices on the future of AI, digital platforms and ecosystems. https://lnkd.in/gG-vjSya

Arkady Volozh, founder of Yandex, the Russian Google, on July 16 announced the creation of a new company – called Nebius Group – that aims to build one of the world’s largest commercially available AI infrastructure businesses out of Europe. Volozh is leading 1,300 employees, mostly ex-Yandex staff, to build Nebius, which, among other things, is developing a cloud computing platform specifically designed to support the training and running of large-scale AI models. Nebius AI is targeting three groups of clients: companies training foundational models, companies – including large corporates – who need to fine-tune and run #AI models, and AI application developers. Nebius’ headquarters and main R&D presence is in Amsterdam, with additional R&D hubs in Europe, North America and Israel. It is already serving customers globally, including Europe’s best-known AI start-ups in France and Germany, according to Volozh. Some 80% of its current clients are based in Silicon Valley. The plan is to provide hundreds of megawatts of capacity in Europe for training #LLMs – mostly in Northern Europe – where electricity is green and cheap- and then build smaller data centers all over the world that are closer to clients that need to run models. https://lnkd.in/e8z9-as3

#AI has yet to fulfill its promise of helping treat or even eradicate some of the most serious diseases. Two initiatives announced last week are hoping to change that. Less than five months after its launch, French startup Bioptimus announced the release of H-optimus-, which is being billed as the world’s largest open-source AI foundation model for pathology. With 1.1 billion parameters, H-optimus-0 is trained on a proprietary dataset of several hundreds of millions of images extracted from over 500,000 histopathology slides across 4,000 clinical practices. This sets a new benchmark for state-of-the-art performance in several critical medical diagnostic tasks, from identifying cancerous cells to detecting genetic abnormalities in the tumor. Meanwhile, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital fund that launched Moderna,an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that focuses on RNA therapeutics, primarily mRNA vaccines , said it is planning to create multiple new biotech companies harnessing #GenAI to power #drugdiscovery after securing $3.6 billion in funding from its financial backers. https://lnkd.in/etp7h_xq

"If you use #AI properly, you can improve #productivity by at least 30%, which all drops to the bottom line. And that's only the beginning," says David Shrier, a venture builder, globally recognized expert on artificial intelligence, author, and a Professor of Practice (Artificial Intelligence and Innovation) at Imperial College London where he director the Centre for Digital Transformation and is co-lead on the Trusted AI Alliance. "But you need to change #mindsets...It is a campaign of sustained change, and it entails a great deal of effort to overcome cognitive biases. If it were easy, everyone would be seeing #exponentialgrowth, rather than only some." Read Shrier's full interview on how to architect exponential growth. Become a subscriber to The Innovator today. https://lnkd.in/evE3egpe  

French-American scale-up Dioxycle, a 2024 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, is developing technology to produce sustainable #ethylene from #carbonemissions, at equal or lower costs to fossil equivalents. The technology can be retrofitted onto existing manufacturing plants, capturing the carbon emitted during the industrial process and transforming it into green ethylene that can be used to make new products, making factories both more sustainable and circular. “Our enabling technology can help existing industry to reinvent their processes,” says co-founder Sarah Lamaison, PhD. The company has initiated a piloting program to give manufacturers early access to the technology. It has already signed letters of intent and memorandums of understanding with companies in a range of sectors, including carbon-intensive manufacturing sectors, consumer brands, and the chemical industry, she says. https://lnkd.in/gw-M9fr6

String Bio Private Limited, a Bengalaru, India-based scale-up, converts #methane, a #greenhousegas, into valuable raw materials to make high-performance products, including #protein for humans, helping to solve two major global issues. Methane, which accounts for at least a quarter of total harmful emissions, helps to form ground-level ozone, a dangerous air pollutant that is responsible for approximately one million deaths and the loss of up to 110 million tons of crops each year, according to a U.N. study. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accelerated reductions in methane emissions must come by 2030 to have any chance of meeting the 1.5°C global temperature target—or even the 2°C target. Meanwhile, the world is expected to face an animal-based protein crisis by 2050 due to unsustainable demand from growing populations worldwide. Increased demand for animal-based protein is expected to have a negative environmental impact, generating greenhouse gas emissions, requiring more water and more land. Experts say addressing this perfect storm will necessitate more sustainable production of existing sources of protein as well as alternative sources for direct human consumption. String Bio, which in June was named a 2024 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, is doing just that by using its patented fermentation platform to convert methane that would otherwise pollute the environment to deliver proteins and protein-based ingredients as a clean and traceable replacement for plant and animal sources. The ultimate aim is to redefine manufacturing, by making sustainability inherent in the way human and animal feed are manufactured, says Dr. Ezhil Subbian, who co-founded the company with her husband, Vinod Kumar, in 2013. String’s commercial products also include ‘bio-stimulants’ for crops such as rice that can increase yield and offset greenhouse gas emissions at the point of use, enhancing sustainability in two ways. https://lnkd.in/eP6Jpndj

"In today’s hype cycle, CEOs are scrambling to effectively communicate how #AI will change their competitive advantage to investors," says Sangeet Paul Choudary, the founder of Platformation Labs and the best-selling author of Platform Revolution and Platform Scale." If you believe, as I do, that AI is increasingly getting commoditized, the question they should be asking is what is our competitive ecosystem and how does AI impact our ability to play in that ecosystem?" Become a subscriber to The Innovator to read The Innovator's interview with Choudary, who has advised the leadership of more than 40 of the Fortune 500 firms and has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. https://lnkd.in/e3ftxnR6  

When Saudi aramco CEO Amin Nasser said last March that #gas and #oil are here to stay, he was stating an inconvenient truth. “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” the CEO said to applause from the audience during a global energy conference in Houston. Despite the world pumping more than $9.5 trillion into the #energytransition over the past two decades, green alternatives have been unable to displace hydrocarbons at scale. Taking a broader perspective, the energy transition is, in fact, stalling, according to the 14th annual edition of the World Economic Forum’s report, Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024,. The report, published in collaboration with Accenture uses the Energy Transition Index (ETI) to benchmark 120 countries on the performance of their current energy systems that uses 46 indicators covering energy sustainability, security and equity. While 107 out of 120 countries have progressed on the ETI over the last decade, there has been a slowdown in the transition due to economic and geopolitical volatilities in recent years that have impacted interconnected global energy systems and value chains. The problem is not the technology readiness of key enablers like #energystorage, #cleanhydrogen, #sustainableaviationfuels, #carboncapture and many other clean technologies, says Maciej Kolaczkowski, who oversees the Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community. The real issue is an absence of compelling business cases. https://lnkd.in/extKD_-X

"Digital technologies push the production and provision of value (products, services, experiences) ever closer to the moment of demand in time and space," says Robert C. Wolcott, the co-author, along with Kaihan Krippendorff , of the new book Proximity, How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society, and Daily Life, which was published in May by Columbia University Press. "This is what Kaihan and I call proximity in our book. We are not talking about better supply chain management. We are talking about the kind of things that dramatically impact the production or the provision of products and services: how we work, eat, create and produce, prevent and cure...All leaders must ask, what will proximity mean for my company, customers, citizens, and even society." https://lnkd.in/eN8qD-dp

Ten years ago, in 2014, Kay Firth-Butterfield was appointed as the World Economic Forum’s Chief #AIEthics Officer. Sadly, far too few organizations have followed the Forum’s lead, she says in her latest exclusive column for The Innovator. Organizations are still putting more emphasis on improving workforce efficiency, identifying new revenue streams, and mitigating cybersecurity risks, than on ensuring #AI is being used responsibly, says Firth-Butterfield. "It is a big mistake to let #ResponsibleAI (RAI) becoming an afterthought or press release talking point," she says in her column. "Many companies which surged ahead without thinking about RAI are now finding themselves in a costly re-wind process to meet regulatory requirements– a cautionary tale for all." https://lnkd.in/enXEh8cQ