- N E W S I N C O N T E X T -

London-based AI company DeepMind — owned by Google parent Alphabet - said it has nearly completed a database of almost every known protein, a breakthrough that is expected to significantly accelerate the time required to make biological discoveries, aiding sustainability, food insecurity and drug discovery efforts.

In July 2021, DeepMind announced it had predicted the shape of all human proteins, helping to better understand human health and disease. That database has been expanded 200-fold, and now contains more than 200 million predicted protein structures. The research community has already used AlphaFold for everything from understanding diseaes to protecting honey beeds to deciphering biological puzzles to looking into the origins of life itself. These structures are now available via a public database hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI).
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most relevant technology news impacting business.

“Whether you’re a beverage, agricultural, pharma or cloud services company, you are waking up to the fact that there is one thing that connects your operations, supply chains, license to operate, and reputation and that is water,” says J. Carl Ganter, founder and CEO of Vector Center.

The U.S.-based global software-as-a-service startup uses AI-powered tools along with satellite data, social sentiment analysis, and context to help global corporations, institutions, and governments better predict and understand how rapidly changing water, food, and energy resources will impact stability, supply chains, sustainability, and brand reputation.

One client is Microsoft, which uses large amounts of water to cool its global data centers. Microsoft is working with Vector Center to measure risks at key locations around the globe and to better understand how it can do its part to help solve water crises. It is an example of how large corporates can work with young companies — from deep-tech ventures like Vector Center to social entrepreneurs — to help reach the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals.

- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K -

- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K -

Charles, a Berlin-based conversational commerce company, is helping European enterprises conduct GDPR-compliant marketing, services, and sales via WhatsApp and other instant messaging services. The software company’s clients include SMEs selling fashion, furniture, cosmetics, pet products and electronics. It is currently piloting its services with large corporates.

“Conversational commerce is the secret sauce in the current difficult economic environment, when it is harder to acquire customers and more important to go the extra mile in retaining the ones you already have or converting the ones you want,” says serial entrepreneur Artjem Weissbeck, who co-founded the company with ex-McKinsey e-Commerce lead Andreas Tussing.

- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K

Amazon's net lost for the second straight quarter as it manages slower demand. Amazon and other tech giants that thrived through the pandemic—as more life and work shifted online—have consistently reported slowing growth in recent days. Inflation is pushing up costs and crimping consumer spending power, and global uncertainty around issues running from Russia’s war on Ukraine to the persistence of Covid-19 has made individuals and businesses more cautious, reports The Wall Street Journal.