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Enjoy this week's issue,
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker
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Leaders from the U.S., Israel, UAE, Bahrain and Morocco joined together on stage at Cybertech Global in Tel Aviv this week to discuss how to best combine forces to combat attacks by cyber criminals and nation-states.
“We are turning Cyber Dome into a reality. This is not a choice anymore. The price we pay keeps getting higher, and all of us are part of the defense team,” Gaby Portnoy, Israel’s Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) said on the main stage.The Cyber-Dome project — a new big data, AI, overall approach to proactive cyber defense - is expected to be a collaborative effort between cybersecurity leaders in Israel and across the globe.
“I want us to build our cyber domes together,” said Portnoy. “The alternative of working alone is just too expensive and less effective. Let’s build our cyber domes now. This is a journey, we can move faster together as a unified front of cyber huddlers.”
If Israeli cyber security expert Hudi Zack, who gave a presentation entitled “7 Bold Cyber Predictions,” is right cooperation between governments and the public and private sectors is more urgent than ever. Read on to learn about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.
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Quantum computing promises to help solve some the world’s biggest challenges, from developing targeted drugs more cheaply and quickly to combating climate change. So, it is no surprise that venture capitalists and governments are pouring money into this space.
China has announced the most public funding to date of any country, more than double the investments by EU governments ($15.3 billion compared to $7.2 billion) and eight times more than US government investments, according to McKinsey.
Israel’s plan to invest $370 million in the sector pales in comparison. But make no mistake about it. Its ambition is much greater than its budget.
Israel intends to create a quantum technologies innovation ecosystem and it will succeed “mainly because of out-of-the-box thinking, entrepreneurship and because of our experience in taking research and speedily executing it into products,” Ami Appelbaum, the Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board of the Israel Innovation Authority, a speaker at DLD Tel Aviv, said in an interview with The Innovator at the conference.
The country plans to use the same playbook it used to create global innovation hubs in areas such as mobility, cybersecurity, food, and medical devices in its approach to quantum technologies, including quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum sensing, he says.
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Who: Cathy Li is Head of Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Sport and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. She is responsible for platform initiatives including the Global Digital Safety Coalition and Defining and Building the Metaverse.
Topic: The metaverse, an immersive and synchronous digital world that is expected to become an $800 billion market by 2024.
Quote: "The Forum is examining the potential benefits and challenges of the metaverse for consumers, industry, and enterprise, focusing on areas such as sustainability, governance, digital identity, privacy, security, and safety. We aim to proactively establish guardrails to prevent repeating the mistakes of Web 2.0."
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Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce company, made headlines when it announced in January that it will conduct a “calendar purge” in 2023, requiring staff to scrap recurring meetings with more than three people in attendance. The news struck a chord with many businesses. Few know exactly how much of their staff’s time is spent in meetings, but many suspect it is too much. According to a Harvard Business Review survey some 65 % of executives say meetings prevent them from completing their own work and 71 % say meetings are unproductive and ineffective.
Time is Ltd., an analytics insights platform that seeks to solve corporate productivity issues by tracking communications and collaborations, aims to help. The Prague-based scaleup’s SaaS offering gives companies a global view of how much time employees and departments are spending on meetings and digital communications. It also helps them measure the effectiveness of communications with clients. Once companies have the data, they can make the necessary fixes and become more agile, says co-founder and CEO Jan Rezab, a speaker at DLD Tel Aviv February 1-2. Customers include Siemens, Google, and Erste Group, one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe.
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Number of active monthly users of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is said to have reached in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study released this week. "In 20 years following the Internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer Internet app," UBS analysts wrote in the note. It took TikTok about nine months after its global launch to reach 100 million users and Instagram 2-1/2 years, according to data collected by Sensor Tower, a group that collects data about app marketplace performance. |
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