By Tiana Cline



Lead poisoning is an issue in Africa where lead-acid batteries reign supreme, powering cars and generators, providing solar power storage, and even backup for cell towers during rolling blackouts. But here’s How one company is transforming resources to power a more connected, sustainable world.



African children have died from lead poisoning. In countries like Botswana, Zambia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Tanzania, blood lead levels is not only unusually high – they’re increasing, according to a report in the Lancet Planetary Health journal. Exposure to lead, a potent neurotoxin, is known to affect the brain resulting in disability (if not death). The World Health Organization states that children are more at risk because high lead exposure damages the brain before it has had a chance to fully develop so one has to ask: where is all this lead coming from?



While certain types of paint contain high levels of lead, America banned the use of these residentially in 1978. In South Africa, however, rules around lead paint were only enforced in 2010 and from October this year, lead paint will be officially classified as a hazardous substance. But paint isn’t the biggest problem – a growing danger is the informal recycling of lead acid batteries. Even though lithium-ion batteries are a better battery (technologically-speaking), lead acid batteries reign supreme across Africa, powering cars and generators, providing solar power storage, and even backup for cell towers during rolling blackouts.



“Batteries are everywhere,” says Jamie Lee, Ecobat’s Chief Information Officer. “You don’t think about it until you think about recycling. In the transportation and energy sector, 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from road transportation. If batteries could be recycled better, it would mean less transport and you’re actually making an impact.”



When lead acid batteries aren’t recycled properly, acid and lead dust enters the soil. The process emits toxic fumes that permeate the air with poison and the workers return home with hazardous dust on their clothing.



“In addition to this, there are certain countries that use child labor to break open batteries and get those materials out which are then sold to the open market,” adds Lee. “We need to configure our supply chain in a way that we can get that battery supply into our hands for recycling. Then when the materials are put out, they go back into the hands of the manufacturers to take over and the result is less mining.”



THE WORLD’S MOST EFFICIENT CIRCULAR ECONOMY



Lee says that while many people believe paper, plastic and glass are the most recycled materials globally, lithium-ion batteries come in second and lead sits at the top of the pyramid.



“The most recycled material worldwide is lead;130 million batteries come through the recycling process,” he adds. “There’s enough lead in the recycling process to not mine for new materials.”



But that’s only when lead-acid batteries are regenerated or refurbished safely – something Ecobat does around the world because lead poisoning isn’t simply an African issue. A new study out of UNICEF found that around 800 million children are exposed to lead annually and the numbers in South Asia are higher than anywhere else.



“We are in a unique position globally as the largest battery recycler. Ecobat’s true impact is its value – if we didn’t exist there would be landfills of batteries,” he says. Recycling batteries is complicated – there’s a chain of over five different work centers to open each battery up, draw chemistries out of it and melt it down before refining the materials and shipping them off. From a safety perspective, there also has to be specialized breathing apparatus in place to ensure the recycling plant meets regulatory standards.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">A new study out of UNICEF found that around 800 million children are exposed to lead annually and the numbers in South Asia are higher than anywhere else.</blockquote>



As battery technology evolves, Ecobat also have had to adapt the way batteries are collected and stored as well as enhance their technical capabilities in the cloud.



“We are in the business of making batteries safe and sustainable which means we need to apply technology and safety. Batteries are not going away – they’re only going up in consumption,” says Lee, adding that the battery market size is expected to grow exponentially by 2030. “That means more and more batteries as well as different types of batteries – we’re chasing technology that’s evolving.”



Lithium-ion batteries, for example, contain 20 different chemistries. Every material inside a battery requires specialization that goes into Ecobat’s engineering in order to maximize sustainability.



“If we maximize our performance, the battery manufacturers can maximize theirs and lead batteries could last longer. If you’re lengthening the cycle, by effectively bringing the product back to recycling, you’re almost completely circular and that’s an exciting place to get to.”



Ecobat have slowly been buying out recycling and manufacturing businesses across Europe, the United Kingdom, America and Africa. So far, they’ve consolidated 2,730 companies under one brand using SAP sustainable intelligence to help them scale their growth.



“We need to reclaim and reuse materials like lead rather than mine more,” says Lee. “Even renewable energies rely on lead acid batteries for backup. Electronic vehicles have lead acid batteries because if their security or intelligence systems go down, you need to transition seamlessly.”



Many African countries today still lack adequate recycling facilities and these informal, lead acid battery processing sites continue to put the health of millions of people at risk. To create an ecological impact, Lee believes that the conversation shouldn’t start with materials like plastic, aluminium and glass.



“That’s all low on the list because we see it being collected – even if it isn’t necessarily being recycled correctly,” he adds. “But we need to get recycling visible and help people understand where batteries of all kinds should not (and cannot) go. We do not want them in landfills – we need batteries to be a key consideration in the recycling process so we can make use of those materials.”

Old leaking batteries

COUNTERING THE DANGERS OF ONE OF THE MOST RECYCLED MATERIALS IN THE WORLD

Is the metaverse the future of the internet? It’s already here with Big Tech banking on it, and it just might unlock untold economic opportunities for Africa.



BY TIANA CLINE



&#8220;IT FEELS LIKE SCI-FI WHEN WE TALK ABOUT it. If you think about the internet that we look at, the metaverse is going to be an internet that we are inside of,” says Derya Matras, Facebook’s Vice President for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. “Over the last few years, we’ve been observing social communication getting more and more immersive. I remember being in high school and dreaming of having a phone that I could take with me everywhere so I could talk to my best friend. Even being able to talk to my parents over video felt like sci-fi twenty years ago. It’s important that we observe where the technology is moving already.”



Matras explains that the metaverse will be made up of a set of digital experiences that seamlessly interconnect. A deeper and wider virtual reality (VR) that is far more than social media and video games. This is one of the reasons Facebook changed its company name to Meta at the end of October 2021.



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:35% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="683" height="1024" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-683x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-53909 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Derya-Matras-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="(max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
The metaverse is going to give a lot of opportunities to Africa but the connectivity has to be there.



– Derya Matras
</div></div>



“Facebook is primarily known as a social media company but we actually define ourselves as a tech company that has the mission of connecting people and businesses. As social technology evolves, we will also,” she says. “Obviously, the metaverse is not there yet and it’s going to take a good ten years to build it all together as an industry.”



Matras believes that the metaverse has the potential to unlock huge economic opportunities for Africa. As a company, Facebook has already made some significant investments into bringing more affordable broadband to the continent. They’re in the process of building 2Africa, the longest undersea cable in the world which will effectively connect three continents – Africa, Europe and Asia (with plans of going live in 2023).



“The metaverse is going to give a lot of opportunities to Africa but the connectivity has to be there. And it is the responsibility of tech players like Facebook and telecom operators and governments to build that collectively,” says Matras. While Facebook, as a social media platform, isn’t going anywhere, what excites Matras the most about the metaverse is its educational implications.



Immersive learning through the use of VR is a field that Louise Claassen, an executive fellow at Henley Business School Africa, is already working on. (And outside of the business school, she also spends a lot of time in AltspaceVR, a social VR platform acquired by Microsoft in 2017.)



“For decades, people have been immersed into the virtual reality space but as individuals. What is happening now is increasingly, we’re seeing multi-user VR environments,” she explains. 



While independent VR social spaces have been in existence for a number of years – many of which already have vibrant, thriving communities – people are now looking into these environments as business tools and in the med-tech space. Research out of the University of Maryland, for example, showed that VR not only increases memory retention, but when used as a learning tool could potentially treat memory-related disorders like Alzheimer’s.



 “One of the qualities we have in virtual reality is embodiment, that sense of being present in a different environment. Your body is responding to where your mind believes that you are. There are all sorts of very interesting opportunities that this convergence into the metaverse present,” says Claassen. 



At Henley, Claassen works with VR by creating rich immersive experiences for her students and in particular, global case studies that transport them to different places to understand different economies: “From a business school perspective, we believe that it’s important for leaders to have well-developed cultural intelligence and they can only do that if they travel. While physically visiting and being immersed in different contexts still has tremendous merit, what virtual reality does is it democratizes that process so more students can go to more locations more frequently.”



What the metaverse can bring to education (and many other sectors) is that immersive experience at the click of a button. A digital twin where data is not only visualized, but augmented.



“When we can see each other move in a three-dimensional space, we decode that information in a very different way and that’s very powerful,” says Claassen, “it give us a much more dynamic experience of the world which is pretty much what the metaverse offers, on scale.”

future technology metaverse

Can The Metaverse Provide Opportunities For Africa That Are Out Of This World?

AS I WATCHED the militant group Taliban take control of Afghanistan, ousting the sitting president and his government, I started to reflect on leadership. Very swiftly, as America was finalizing its withdrawal of troops, insurgents stormed across the country, capturing all major cities. It was a stark reminder of how precarious and delicate the concept of leadership is.



In 1994, Brooks Bash poignantly asked if leadership and parochialism or narrow-mindedness were an enduring reality. Yet, with the turn of the century, there was evidently no room for parochialism.



As globalism took hold, leadership stretched beyond the confines of walls and of borders. Strangely enough, when borders closed as nations locked down last year in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were once again staring down the barrel of parochialism. How have we managed to fall so woefully behind? We are collectively navigating a particularly challenging period – one defined by the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in populism and resultingly a rise in intolerance alongside technological shifts at an unprecedented rate.



Perhaps the most stark question we have been faced with against this backdrop is what should leadership look like? How we respond as leaders will be a greater definer of the times. Will parochialism once again define leadership? Historically, we have seen the impact of pandemics, of wars based on intolerance and of industrial revolutions. Though these events soon took their rightful place in the annals of history, the response of leaders has remained stark in our collective memory.



Parallel to the pandemic, we have entered the era of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). The 4IR is changing every facet of society from the way we interact, to how our industries operate to the way we consume. While we have long been on the cusp of the 4IR, it is safe to say our current circumstances have hastened this shift.



As we interrogate leadership against our current and rather grim context, it is apparent that it is not willingness but the arsenal of skills needed to confront a major anxiety that is the essence of leadership. Of course, with the rapid pace of change we now find ourselves faced with, we have to interrogate what these skills should look like.



As we battle the pandemic, I have spent much of my time trying to understand what leadership in the 21st century means. Faced with the seemingly impossible task of righting the ship against a turbulent and unpredictable backdrop, leaders have had to take extraordinary measures, create Marshall plans and deploy resources. As the pandemic rolled into its second year, it became increasingly apparent that leadership could not be discussed in the abstract, or in terms of theoretical frameworks.



Rather, leadership as a practice needs to be interrogated and the layers of complexity have to be unpacked. Though there are various levels of complexities, it is apparent that a leader needs 4IR thinking, which entails the following skills: complex problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence, judgement and decision-making, service orientation, negotiation and cognitive flexibility. Importantly, we have to lead from a place of knowledge.



How do we begin to adapt to a changing world, and our changing circumstances, if those at the helm of our country are ill-equipped? For instance, as we modernize and reform our agricultural systems through land reform, we must have sufficient people who are knowledgeable in the political economy of farming to ensure continued food security and global competitiveness. As we tackle the problems of our shrinking industries, we need to understand issues of automation, technology and human capital to improve the quality of life of our people. This fundamentally calls for a reimagining of what it takes to be a leader. Are we ensuring that our engineers, our academics, our scientists and our philosophers are at the fore of leadership? This is crucial if we are to close the gaps that exist.



As we face an ever-changing context, leadership must speak to it. Will we continue to widen our disparities or will we find solutions to some of our most deep-seated inequities? Will we continue to let intolerance define our world order or in the disarray we find ourselves in, will we forge a sense of unity? There are leadership lessons to be learned from the successes and mistakes of the last year. If we are to use the pandemic as a yardstick for leadership strategies going forward, it must remain stark in our minds what accounted for the successes. If we are indeed to tap into the promise and override the peril, we must begin by approaching leadership differently and reimagine what it takes to be a leader in this new world.



By TSHILIDZI MARWALA The writer is the Vice- Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg, a member of the Namibia 4IR task force and author of the book ‘Leadership Lessons From The Books I Have Read’.

Smart city and global communication network ,Business  concept..

Reimagining Of The Leader In A New World

TOPLINE ‘“HUMAN ONE,” the follow-up to NFT artist Beeple’s record-breaking <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/03/11/beeple-art-sells-for-693-million-becoming-most-expensive-nft-ever/?sh=6dfeaf102448">$69.3 million nonfungible token</a>, sold for $28.9 million including hammer fees, shattering auction estimates for the artist’s first physical work.



<h2 id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



The buyer, an online bidder in Switzerland, placed the winning bid of $25 million at Christie’s on Tuesday evening, ending with “HUMAN ONE” fetching $10 million more than the auction estimate of $15 million.



It’s the first physical work from Michael Winkelmann, who goes by the moniker Beeple and helped set off the NFT craze in March when his “ Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” sold for <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/10/28/nft-artist-beeples-first-physical-piece-could-fetch-15-million-at-auction/?sh=5cb1b42062ce">an unprecedented $69.3 million</a>.



“HUMAN ONE” is a seven-foot-tall box made of LED screens playing a loop of footage of a person wearing an astronaut-like suit walking through extraterrestrial-inspired backdrops, with a rotating base that shows the viewer different angles.



Winkelmann will periodically edit the video playing on the screens using blockchain, the artist said in a Christie’s statement, and plans to continue updating the footage throughout his lifetime.



The ability to continuously shift the work even after purchase creates a new dynamic between artist and owner, one that Winkelmann compared to having “an ongoing conversation.”



Christie’s representatives said the piece garnered major interest from potential buyers immediately after the sale of the statue was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/10/28/nft-artist-beeples-first-physical-piece-could-fetch-15-million-at-auction/?sh=5cb1b42062ce">announced last month</a>.



<h2 id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



The popularity of NFTs has exploded in 2021 parallel with the ascent of cryptocurrency, which is used to purchase digital artworks. NFT artists use the blockchain to tokenize their NFTs, like how investors track cryptocurrency. The sale of “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” placed Winkelmann among the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/03/11/beeple-art-sells-for-693-million-becoming-most-expensive-nft-ever/?sh=6dfeaf102448">most valuable artists alive</a>, following only David Hockney and Jeff Koons. Christie’s previously announced it would accept cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ethereum for the piece, along with dollars, but it was not immediately clear how the buyer would pay for the statue.



<h2 id="h-contra">CONTRA</h2>



Not everyone in the art world is thrilled about NFTs. Hockney has slammed NFTs as “silly little things&#8221; and called the people who create and buy them “<a href="https://decrypt.co/63917/artist-of-worlds-most-expensive-painting-nfts-are-for-crooks-and-swindlers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">crooks and swindlers</a>.”



<h2 id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/10/28/nft-artist-beeples-first-physical-piece-could-fetch-15-million-at-auction/?sh=5cb1b42062ce">NFT Artist Beeple’s First Physical Piece Could Fetch $15 Million At Auction</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/03/11/beeple-art-sells-for-693-million-becoming-most-expensive-nft-ever/?sh=6dfeaf102448">Beeple NFT Sells For $69.3 Million, Becoming Most-Expensive Ever</a> (Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/"></a>By Carlie Porterfield, Forbes Staff

Screenshot 2021-11-10 at 11.14.01

NFT Star Beeple’s First Real-Life Piece Fetches $28.9 Million

TOPLINE One week after Facebook announced it would rebrand to Meta to focus on a metaverse where people can meet and connect virtually using any device, Nike appears among the first major brands preparing for a launch into the metaverse.



<h2 id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



<a href="https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=login&amp;p_lang=english&amp;p_d=trmk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nike</a>&nbsp;filed trademark applications last week with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for Nike-branded virtual goods, including clothing and sneakers, with sources telling&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/nike-is-quietly-preparing-for-the-metaverse-.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CNBC News</a>&nbsp;that the move is the company’s first step toward rolling out virtual products in the metaverse space.



The day Facebook announced its rebranding, it tweeted at Texas supermarket chain&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/Meta/status/1453898356086956044?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1453898356086956044%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysanantonio.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Farticle%2FMeta-tweets-at-HEB-metaverse-16582277.php" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">H-E-B</a>, “wondering what groceries in the metaverse will look like,” signaling a potential collaboration where people could order groceries virtually online, as the supermarket chain completes construction on a new&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/news/2020/01/10/first-look-h-e-b-s-massive-headquarters-expansion.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tech center</a>&nbsp;in San Antonio.



Meta has also hinted at working with its long-time e-commerce partner&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/meta/status/1454167184834502661?s=21" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Shopify</a>, saying it “couldn’t wait to explore” the possibilities of selling “physical and digital products” with the company in the metaverse.



<h2 id="h-tanegnt">TANEGNT</h2>



Microsoft has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a>&nbsp;it would create their own digital virtual universe called “<a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Microsoft Mesh</a>” — a direct competition to Facebook’s metaverse — and it would introduce new features to Microsoft Teams like 3D avatars and virtual meeting rooms as a part of its digital offerings.



<h2 id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



Facebook’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakim/2021/10/28/facebook-announces-new-name-meta/?sh=9d1834c7f833">name change</a>&nbsp;and new announcements come as the company faces scrutiny for internal documents that were released by whistleblower Francis Haugen, who alleged the company allowed misinformation to spread on its platform and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/09/29/facebook-publishes-criticized-instagram-research-into-teen-health-ahead-of-congressional-testimony/?sh=797e48a8310e">ignored research</a>&nbsp;that its apps were harmful to teen mental health, which Zuckerberg has denied. In an effort to distance itself from the allegations, the company rebranded and announced a slew of new features coming to its platforms, including the building of its metaverse. Zuckerberg said they had high hopes for it, with a&nbsp;<a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">goal</a>&nbsp;of reaching a billion people and hosting “hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce.”



<h2 id="h-what-to-watch-out-for">WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR</h2>



At Facebook’s annual Connect conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave some&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakim/2021/10/28/facebook-announces-new-name-meta/?sh=9d1834c7f833">details</a>&nbsp;into the digital world the company hopes to build, saying it would create virtual spaces for work and education, as well as virtual workout sessions. In a&nbsp;<a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">founder’s letter</a>&nbsp;released with the launch of the company’s new name Meta, Zuckerberg said people would be able to do “almost anything you can imagine” and that they want the metaverse to feel as if a person is “right there with another person or in another place.”&nbsp;



<h2 id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakim/2021/10/28/facebook-announces-new-name-meta/?sh=9d1834c7f833">Facebook Announces New Name: Meta</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/11/02/most-americans-still-like-facebook-poll-finds-but-not-mark-zuckerberg-or-its-new-meta-name/?sh=73fc2a941cbd">Most Americans Still Like Facebook, Poll Finds—But Not Mark Zuckerberg Or Its New Meta Name</a> (Forbes)



<meta charset="utf-8">By Kimberlee Speakman, Forbes Staff

In this photo illustration a Nike logo seen displayed on a

Virtual Nikes: Shoe Giant Follows Facebook Into The Metaverse

TOPLINE Tech giants Apple and Amazon both came up short of expectations in quarterly earnings reports released after market close Thursday and warned of supply chain issues cutting into their bottom lines, causing Apple to fall 3.4% and Amazon to dip 3.6% in after-hours trading.



<h2 id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



Apple&nbsp;<a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;revenue of $83.4 billion for the quarter ending September 25, a 29%year-over-year jump, though it was slightly below analyst&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/apple-aapl-q4-2021-earnings.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">expectations</a>, while its earnings per share of $1.24 per share matched forecasts.



Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/apple-aapl-q4-2021-earnings.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CNBC</a>&nbsp;that “supply constraints,” including chip shortages, cost the company $6 billion in revenue.



Amazon&nbsp;<a href="https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q3/Q3-2021-Earnings-Release.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;$110.81 billion in revenue for the quarter, also below&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/amazon-amzn-earnings-q3-2021.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">forecasts</a>, while its $6.12 earnings per share were well short of the $8.92 expected by analysts.



Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also&nbsp;<a href="https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2021/Amazon.com-Announces-Third-Quarter-Results/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>&nbsp;that supply chain issues will cost the company “several billion dollars” in the current quarter, coinciding with the critical shopping season.



<h2 id="h-crucial-quote">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



Jassy detailed problems Amazon expects to face in the fourth quarter in the earnings&nbsp;<a href="https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q3/Q3-2021-Earnings-Release.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">release</a>: “We expect to incur several billion dollars of additional costs in our Consumer business as we manage through labor supply shortages, increased wage costs, global supply chain issues, and increased freight and shipping costs.”



<h2 id="h-big-number">BIG NUMBER</h2>



$38.87 billion. That’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY21_Q4_Consolidated_Financial_Statements.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">how much</a>&nbsp;in iPhone sales Apple brought in last quarter.



<h2 id="h-tangent">TANGENT</h2>



Amazon and Apple were not the only members of the FAANG stock group (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) making headlines Thursday—Facebook changed its name to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakim/2021/10/28/facebook-announces-new-name-meta/?sh=1224f8677f83">Meta</a>&nbsp;Thursday to reflect its foray into augmented reality and virtual reality.



<h2 id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/apple-aapl-q4-2021-earnings.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple sales miss expectations, Tim Cook says supply issues cost company $6 billion (CNBC)</a>



<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/28/amazon-amzn-earnings-q3-2021.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Amazon badly misses on earnings and revenue, gives disappointing fourth-quarter guidance (CNBC)</a>Follow me on <a href="https://www.twitter.com/derek_saul" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Twitter</a>. Send me a secure <a href="https://www.forbes.com/tips/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">tip</a>. 



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/"></a>By Derek Saul, FORBES STAFF

In this photo illustration, a silhouette hand is seen

Amazon And Apple Both Fall Short Of Earnings Expectations, Citing Supply Chain Snags

With depression spiraling in a pandemic world, South African researchers receive seed funding for an online mental health screening app that speeds access to diagnosis and treatment. Health workers in this sector say those asking for help has increased by 160%. 



The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a massive toll on the mental health of people globally, as recent research has shown. The combination of public health actions such as physical distancing that have lessened social interactions and the additional economic stress amongst other factors have meant that many are experiencing increased mental health challenges. South African researchers are now developing an innovative, validated online tool to help people recognize and seek treatment for depression. 



PhD candidate Tasneem&nbsp;Hassem&nbsp;of the University of the Witwatersrand&nbsp;in Johannesburg, along with co-founder&nbsp;Professor Sumaya Laher,&nbsp;have&nbsp;been awarded almost $7,000 in seed funding to further&nbsp;develop and&nbsp;commercialize&nbsp;the tool,&nbsp;aimed at allowing users to more easily&nbsp;recognize&nbsp;and obtain treatment for depression, particularly within the South African context, where low mental health awareness and access to mental health services can still be a challenge.&nbsp; &nbsp; “Unfortunately, low awareness of the symptoms of depression means that many people do not know when they are depressed. During our research and through interviews with stakeholders, we determined that an online screening tool would help raise awareness of depression, reduce the stigma and facilitate quality conversations between people and health professionals”&nbsp;says&nbsp;Hassem&nbsp;to FORBES AFRICA.&nbsp;



&nbsp; According to a recent&nbsp;report&nbsp;in&nbsp;The Lancet&nbsp;which&nbsp;assessed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health in 204 countries, anxiety and depressive disorders increased by some 25%&nbsp;across the countries sampled, with South Africa seeing one of the highest rates of increase worldwide.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; “The emergence&nbsp;of the Covid-19 pandemic has created an environment where many determinants of poor mental health are exacerbated,” the study continued.&nbsp;&nbsp;



This is&nbsp;confirmed in the South African context by the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), a mental health services and advocacy organization.&nbsp;



“We know that the mental health impact during Covid&nbsp;has been immense&nbsp;– we’ve seen that at SADAG,” says&nbsp;Cassey Chambers, SADAG’s operations coordinator, to FORBES AFRICA.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“Just from January&nbsp;this year, we received over 466,000 calls to our helplines. One in every five calls is a suicide-related issue.&nbsp;And that’s still a conservative figure. Our call volumes from pre-Covid [to this year]&nbsp;has&nbsp;increased by 160%. Covid&nbsp;has definitely impacted mental health, it’s definitely added to more depression, more anxiety, added to people’s mental health issues… Covid&nbsp;has definitely increased the mental health impact.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



Ensuring&nbsp;mental health tools&nbsp;are relevant to&nbsp;the context and location in which they will be used is a crucial part of ethical and successful interventions, which was a critical focus of&nbsp;Hassem’s&nbsp;research and piloting of the app, with the guidance of healthcare professionals.&nbsp; &nbsp; “Adapting the tool was challenging as we had to consider various factors such as the ethical principles associated with online mental health screening, cultural appropriateness, content validity of the items as well as the fact that&nbsp;a&nbsp;majority of potential tool users are not first-language English speakers,” says&nbsp;Hassem.&nbsp;



The tool’s development funding comes through the University of the Witwatersrand’s Prospector course which aims to foster and develop promising entrepreneurial ideas in research – with&nbsp;Hassem’s&nbsp;proposal securing funding over seven other proposals, with the project being&nbsp;of possibly high value in South Africa, where mental health resources are extremely&nbsp;limited, with some four mental health spaces per 100,000 members of the population, and just 0.97 psychologists for the same number.&nbsp;



“What is exciting in this instance is that the tool developed by&nbsp;Ms&nbsp;Hassem&nbsp;and Prof&nbsp;Laher has significant potential to support our communities&nbsp;in an illness that is prevalent, yet difficult to diagnose and treat not least&nbsp;because of the unfortunate stigma associated with it. Innovation must meet the real needs of our citizens, and it’s not just about profits,”&nbsp;comments&nbsp;Ela Romanowska, Director of Innovation Support at Wits Enterprise, which supports the initiative.&nbsp;



&nbsp; “Our tool is specifically adapted to capture the unique depression symptoms experienced by South African individuals. The user receives instant, downloadable feedback that provides resources for seeking treatment or care and can be used in the comfort of one’s home, on any smartphone, tablet, laptop or computer,” explains&nbsp;Hassem.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Three woman holding their mobile phones outside and looking at the screens

‘One In Every Five Calls Suicide-Related’: New Tech To Treat Depression In South Africa

Five years ago, from her prison cell, trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning sketched out a new way to protect online privacy. Now, she is helping an MIT-affiliated cryptographer bring the next generation of privacy software online.



Chelsea Manning’s long blonde hair catches in a cool summer breeze as she turns the corner into Brooklyn’s Starr Bar, a dimly lit counter-cultural haunt in the heart of the hipster enclave of Bushwick. The 33-year-old best known for leaking hundreds of thousands of top-secret government documents to Julian Assange in 2010, then coming out as a transgender woman, walks past a poster depicting sea turtles, humans and geese merging to form the outline of a dove. Beside the image are the words, “Your Nations Cannot Contain Us.”



Dressed in a black suit and wearing a silver Omega watch, she makes her way to a small wooden table illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. She orders a coke. Contrary to what one might expect, this whistleblower turned trans-icon looks uncomfortable in the hip surroundings. A fan reverently approaches her and welcomes her back. “This is my life,” she says after he leaves, expressing both gratitude for the well wishes, and lamenting the loss of her privacy. “I’m not just famous, I’m in the history books.”



While serving the longest sentence ever doled out to a whistleblower after she used the privacy protecting Tor Network to anonymously leak 700,000 government documents, she used her time in incarceration to devise a better way to hide the tracks of other online users. Knowing that the non-profit Tor Project she used to send files to Wikileaks had become increasingly vulnerable to the prying eyes of intelligence agencies and law enforcement, she sketched out a new way to hide internet traffic using blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to build a similar network, without troublesome government funding. The entire plan was hatched in a military prison, on paper.



The privacy network industry, including the virtual-private networks (VPNs) familiar to many corporate users, generated $29 billion in revenue in 2019, and is expected to triple to $75 billion by 2027. Fixing the known weaknesses of these networks is about more than just protecting future whistleblowers and criminals. Private networks are also vital for big businesses who want to protect trade secrets. Manning thinks that not-for-profit efforts like Tor, which relies on U.S. government funding and a worldwide network of volunteers to run its anonymous servers, aren’t robust enough. “Nonprofits are unsustainable,” says Manning casually, sipping from her Coke. “They require constant upholding by large capital funds, by large governments.”



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fimageserve%2F61252ad46f47d2194c1d0d80%2F20210621-162555%2F1960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale" alt="20210621_162555"/><figcaption>Nym Technologies founder Harry Halpin sips on a “homojito” at Brooklyn’s LGBTQ-friendly Starr Bar, as he and Chelsea Manning discuss their nascent partnership, formalized in July.&nbsp;MICHAEL DEL CASTILLO FOR FORBES</figcaption></figure>



By January 2017, she was seven-years into a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, home to the likes of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 14 fellow soldiers in 2009. As President Barack Obama prepared to leave office, he granted Manning an unconditional commutation of her sentence. Newly tasting freedom, she was contacted by Harry Halpin, the 41-year-old mathematician who worked for World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT from 2013 to 2016 helping standardize the use of cryptography across web browsers.



Halpin asked Manning to look for security weaknesses in his new privacy project, which eventually became Nym, a Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based crypto startup. Halprin founded Nym in 2018 to send data anonymously around the Internet using the same blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin. To date, Nym has raised some $8.5 million from a group of crypto investors including Binance, Polychain Capital and NGC Ventures. The firm now employs 10 people and is using its latest round of capital to double its team size.



Halpin was impressed by Manning’s technical knowledge. More than just a famous leaker who happened to have access to secret documents, Manning struck Halpin as someone with a deep technological understanding of how governments and big business seek to spy on private messages.



“We&#8217;ve very rarely had access to people who really were inside the machine, who can explain what they believe the actual capabilities of these kinds of adversaries are, what kinds of attacks are more likely,” says Halpin. “She&#8217;ll help us fix holes in our design.”



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Born in Oklahoma on December 17, 1987, Manning had her first exposure to network traffic analysis in high school. She and her Welsh mother Susan had moved to Haverfordwest, Wales in 2001, when Manning was 13. In a computer class there, in 2003, she first learned to circumvent blocks put in place by the school to prevent students downloading certain files—and got caught pirating music by Linkin Park, Jay-Z and others. The headmaster had been watching remotely.&nbsp;“It was the first moment where it dawned on me, ‘Oh, this is a thing. You can do this.’”



By 2008 Manning’s interest in what’s called network traffic analysis first brought her to The Onion Router (Tor), a volunteer network of computers that sits on top of the internet and helps hide a user’s identity. The non-profit organization leveraged something called onion routing which hides messages beneath layers of encryption. Each message is only decipherable by a different member of the network, which routes the message to the next router, ensuring only the sender and receiver can decipher it all. Ironically, the network colloquially known as the Dark Web, and used by Manning to send classified documents to WikiLeaks, was developed by the U.S. government to protect spies and other government agents operating online.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fimageserve%2F6123cdbdc986a89368d58199%2FChelsea-MAnning-by-Jamel-Toppin-for-Forbes-DSC7733%2F1960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale" alt="Chelsea MAnning by Jamel Toppin for Forbes_DSC7733" width="710" height="887"/><figcaption>Much of Manning’s consulting work comes with mutually binding non-disclosure agreements that make it difficult for her to market her business.&nbsp;JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES</figcaption></figure></div>



At around the same time Manning discovered Tor, she joined the U.S. Army. As a young intelligence analyst her job was to sort through classified databases in search of tactical patterns. After becoming disillusioned with what she learned about the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, she plugged into her computer, put in her headphones, and loaded a CD with music from another of her favorite musicians: Lady Gaga. Instead of listening to the album though, she erased it and downloaded what would eventually be known as the largest single leak in U.S. history, ranging from sensitive diplomatic cables to video showing U.S. soldiers killing civilians, including two Reuters journalists.



In prison she studied carpentry, but she never stopped exploring her earlier vocation. “I&#8217;m a certified carpenter,” she says. “But when I wasn&#8217;t doing that, I would read a lot of cryptography papers.” In 2016, she was visited in prison by Yan Zhu, a physicist from MIT who would later go on to become chief security officer of Brave, a privacy-protecting internet browser that pays users in cryptocurrency in exchange for agreeing to see ads.



She and Zhu were concerned with vulnerabilities they saw in Tor, including its dependence on the good will of governments and academic institutions. In 2020 53% of its $5 million&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-our-2019-and-2020-financials" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">funding</a>&nbsp;came from the US government and 27% came from other Western governments, tax-subsidized non-profits, foundations and companies. Worse, in their opinion, the technology to break privacy was being funded at a higher rate than the technology to protect it.



“As the dark web, or Tor, and VPN, and all these other services became more prolific, the tools to do traffic analysis had dramatically improved,” says Manning. “And there’s sort of been a cold war that&#8217;s been going on between the Tor project developers, and a number of state actors and large internet service providers.” In 2014 the FBI learned how to decipher Tor data. By 2020 a single user reportedly controlled enough Tor nodes to steal bitcoin transactions initiated over the network.



Using two lined pieces of composition paper from the prison commissary, Manning drew a schematic for Zhu of what she called, Tor Plus. Instead of just encrypting the data she proposed to inject the information equivalent of noise into network communications. In the margins of the document she even postulated that blockchain, the technology popularized by bitcoin, could play a role. In the notes below she wrote the words: “New Hope.”



Then, this February Halpin woke her up late one night with an encrypted text message asking her to take a look at a paper describing Nym. Developed completely separately from Manning’s jailhouse sketch, the paper detailed an almost identical system disguising real messages with white noise. A hybrid of the decentralized Tor that relies on donor support, and a corporate owned VPN that requires trusting a company, this network promised the best of both worlds. Organized as a for-profit enterprise, Nym would pay people and organizations running the network in cryptocurrency. “The next day I cleared my schedule,” she says. By July she’d signed a contract with Nym to run a security audit that could eventually include a closer look at the code, the math, and the defensive scenarios against government attacks.



Unlike Tor, which uses the onion router to obscure data sent on a shared network, Nym uses what’s called a mix network, or mixnet, that not only shuffles the data, but alternates the methods by which the data is shuffled making it nearly impossible to reassemble.



“Imagine you have a deck of cards,” says Manning. “What&#8217;s really unique here is that what&#8217;s being done is that you are taking essentially a deck of cards, and you are taking a bunch of other decks of cards, and you are shuffling those decks of cards as well.”



And, as it, turns out, not every government is comfortable using a privacy network largely funded by the U.S. government. Despite Halpin’s commitment to build a network that doesn’t require government funding to operate, in July Nym accepted a 200,000 euro grant from the European Commission, to help get it off the ground.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">&#8220;Knowing that Wikileaks had become increasingly vulnerable to prying eyes from intelligence agencies and law enforcement, she sketched out a new way to hide internet traffic using blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin.&#8221;</blockquote>



“The problem is that there was never a financial model that made any sense to build this technology,” says Halpin. “There was no interest from users, venture capital, and big companies. And now you&#8217;re seeing what we consider a once in a lifetime alignment of the stars, where there&#8217;s interest in privacy from venture capital. There&#8217;s an interest in privacy for users. There&#8217;s interest in privacy from companies. And most of the interest from the venture capital side and the company side, and the user side has been driven by cryptocurrency. And this was not the case even five years ago.”



Even Tor itself is exploring how to use blockchain to create the next generation of its software. After receiving 26% of its total donations in cryptocurrency last year, the Tor Project received a $670,000 grant from advocates of the zcash cryptocurrency and sold a non-fungible token (NFT) representing the first .onion address for $2 million in May, 2021. Now, Tor’s cofounder, Nick Mathewson&nbsp;says the Seattle-based non-profit is exploring some of the same techniques developed by cryptocurrency companies to create Tor credentials that let users develop a reputation without revealing their identity. What he calls an “anonymous blacklistable credential.”



“If you&#8217;ve got a website, and somebody does something you don&#8217;t like, you can ban them,” says Mathewson. “You can ban the person who did that activity without ever finding out what other activities they did or figuring out who you banned.”



Though Mathewson is interested in the possibility of using blockchain to upgrade Tor itself, he warns that making privacy infrastructure for-profit could lead to more money being spent on marketing than product development. “Our mission is to encourage the use of privacy technology,” says Mathewson. “I don&#8217;t really care whether that privacy tool is the one I made or not.”



Ironically, the same cryptocurrency culture Halpin says brought so much attention from investors, deterred Manning from getting involved earlier. Though she counts herself among the earliest bitcoin adopters, claiming to have mined cryptocurrency shortly after Satoshi Nakomoto activated it in 2009, she sold her bitcoin last year for decidedly non-monetary reasons.



“I am not a fan of the culture around blockchain and cryptocurrency,” she says. “There&#8217;s a lot of large personalities that are very out there like your Elon Musk&#8217;s and whatnot,” she says. “And it&#8217;s very, like, ‘Oh, we&#8217;re going to get rich off of blockchain.’ It&#8217;s very nouveau riche. Like a new-yuppies-bro-culture that&#8217;s surrounded it. It has gotten a little bit better in some corners. But I think that culture is what I&#8217;m talking about. It&#8217;s like Gordon Gekko, but blockchain.”



By Michael del Castillo, Forbes Staff

Chelsea Manning Appears Before Second Grand Jury In Wikileaks Investigation

Chelsea Manning Is Back, And Hacking Again, Only This Time For A Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup

A former Microsoft security staffer has warned that cybercriminals are mass exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange email servers because organizations were not properly warned which systems to patch.



Many organizations appear not to have patched, which has led to mass exploitation of the vulnerabilities, warned Kevin Beaumont, who posted about the issues on his<a href="https://doublepulsar.com/multiple-threat-actors-including-a-ransomware-gang-exploiting-exchange-proxyshell-vulnerabilities-c457b1655e9c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;DoublePulsar blog</a>. Hundreds of U.S. government systems are exposed, he added, while the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) issued an&nbsp;<a href="https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/current-activity/2021/08/21/urgent-protect-against-active-exploitation-proxyshell" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">alert</a>&nbsp;on Saturday.



“They are pre-authenticated (no password required) remote code execution vulnerabilities, which is as serious as they come,” he wrote.&nbsp;“Microsoft knew this would blow up in an international incident for customers. I know this because I worked there, and told people.” He noted that while Microsoft issued fixes five months ago, it hadn’t given the vulnerabilities standard identifying numbers to make it easier for users to determine what needed patching. “It created a situation where Microsoft’s customers were misinformed about the severity of one of the most critical enterprise security bugs of the year,” Beaumont added. (Microsoft hadn’t responded to a request for comment on Beaumont’s allegations at the time of publication.)



Among the hackers taking advantage of that is the ransomware group known as LockFile has been seen taking advantage of the flaws, which were first patched by Microsoft in March. LockFile has been linked to ransomware attacks on victims in various industries &#8211; including manufacturing, financial services, engineering and tourism -​​ around the globe, mostly in the U.S. and Asia, according to security company Symantec. It was first seen on the network of a U.S. financial organization on July 20, it wrote in a company&nbsp;<a href="https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/lockfile-ransomware-new-petitpotam-windows" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blog post</a>.



The origins of the attacks can be traced back to weaknesses uncovered during a hacking contest earlier this year and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2021/8/17/from-pwn2own-2021-a-new-attack-surface-on-microsoft-exchange-proxyshell" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">detailed in full last week by Orange Tsai</a>. He found three weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange (the on-premise version, not Office 365), which, when combined, could be used to remotely take control of an email server.



Beaumont has now released a tool to help identify unpatched systems. It’s already been put to use by the national Computer Emergency Response Team in Austria to scan for vulnerable servers.



CISA said it “strongly urges organizations to identify vulnerable systems on their networks and immediately apply&nbsp;<a href="https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/current-activity/2021/05/11/microsoft-releases-may-2021-security-updates" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Microsoft&#8217;s Security Update from May 2021</a>—which remediates all three ProxyShell vulnerabilities—to protect against these attacks.”



Governments and private organizations across the world rely on Microsoft Exchange to run their day-to-day email, but this year it’s come under repeated attack with <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2021/03/03/microsoft-issues-critical-update-warning-as-chinese-hackers-attack-exchange-servers/">devastating large-scale hacks</a>. They <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/07/19/us-nato-and-allies-accuse-china-of-hacking-microsoft">included attacks that the Biden administration pinned on China</a>, which the country denied.



By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff

Storefronts And General Views Of Cologne

Warning: ‘Extremely Serious’ Microsoft Vulnerabilities Hacked By Ransomware Criminals

Forbes2021-86

Nigeria’s Fintech Frenzy: Onwards And Upwards

Bill Gates-backed Vicarious Surgical, which is set to go public in a SPAC deal, hopes to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2027 as it takes on the Goliath of surgical robots.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-28-at-18.00.18-1024x378.png" alt="" class="wp-image-51974" width="399" height="147" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-28-at-18.00.18-1024x378.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-28-at-18.00.18-300x111.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-28-at-18.00.18-768x283.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-28-at-18.00.18-1536x566.png 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-28-at-18.00.18-2048x755.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 399px) 100vw, 399px" /><figcaption>Twitter</figcaption></figure></div>



As a kid, Adam Sachs, cofounder and CEO of Vicarious Surgical, watched the 1966 science-fiction movie&nbsp;Fantastic Voyage&nbsp;and was enamored of the premise of microscopic surgeons who performed surgery inside a scientist’s brain. “Humans are the wrong size to operate on humans,” he says. “We’re not going to shrink humans down, but we can create avatars of them. We can create little miniature robotic versions.”&nbsp;



That’s just what he and his Vicarious Surgical cofounders—Sammy Khalifa, the company’s chief technology officer, and Dr. Barry Greene, its chief medical officer—have spent the past decade doing. They have developed an itty-bitty robot paired with a VR headset for abdominal surgeries that they hope to bring to market in 2023. Its two arms and camera are designed to enter the patient’s belly through an incision of less than an inch and operate in all directions once there. Shrinking a surgical robot down is exceptionally difficult, but by doing so the Vicarious trio hopes to help doctors perform abdominal surgeries, starting with hernia operations, faster, safer and with fewer complications than existing alternatives.&nbsp;



It’s not exactly the sci-fi stuff of the movie, in which doctors are injected into the patient’s bloodstream, but it’s futuristic enough that Vicarious has attracted A-list investors including Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, Eric Schmidt and Jerry Yang. It has also received a breakthrough designation from the FDA—the first for a surgical robot—making it eligible for priority review.



“Putting the elbow down inside the body cavity and being able to reach back and work toward the abdominal wall is a pretty big deal,” says Paul Hermes, who ran Medtronic’s robotics program and is now an advisor to Vicarious. “We should expect robotic surgery to get better.”&nbsp;



The company is set to go public via a merger with a SPAC set up by Hong Kong investor Donald Tang. The $1.1 billion deal will raise $115 million and bring in medical-technology giant Becton Dickinson, which makes the surgical mesh used in hernia repairs, as an investor. It forecasts reaching $1 billion in annual revenue by 2027.&nbsp;



“We’re going after the markets where existing surgical robots have struggled,” says Sachs, 30. “There are a lot of copycats out there aiming at the incumbent. They have the same challenges. . . . Our architecture is just totally different.”&nbsp;



The behemoth in robotic surgery is $115 billion (market cap) Intuitive Surgical, which introduced the da Vinci, a large four-armed robot that holds sticklike instruments, two decades ago and has dominated the space ever since. As Intuitive’s patents expire and robotic technology advances, competitors including J&amp;J and Medtronic, both of which have acquired surgical-robot startups, are vying to make robotic surgery as common as laparoscopy. The Vicarious robot’s expected price of around $1.2 million, roughly half that of existing topline robots, could be a factor in its favor, as could the ease with which surgeons can learn how to use it. 



Sachs’ own education with machine design began in his suburban Boston home. His father, Ely Sachs, is an MIT professor of mechanical engineering who is considered the elder statesman of 3D printing; his mother is an architect. He met Khalifa, 31, during his freshman year at MIT, where both studied engineering. They became fast friends and spent their spare time in the school’s machine shop making actuators, the mechanical components that power a robot’s joints. “We’d test them, we’d find out they didn’t work and we’d do that over and over again,” Sachs says.&nbsp;



While Sachs and Khalifa were still in college, they started working with Greene, a bariatric surgeon and friend of Sachs’ family, on a medical device that became the robot. In 2014, after a brief stint at Apple, Sachs officially launched Vicarious with $400,000 in seed funding led by Michael Rothenberg (the VC later charged with fraud by the Department of Justice in an unrelated case). In 2015, Khalifa quit his job to join.&nbsp;



The hardest part over the years, Sachs says, was figuring out the actuators. Making them small enough to include nine of them, three times what’s typical for surgical robots, was tough. So too was decoupling them so each joint could move separately, helped by 28 sensors per arm.&nbsp;



Carnegie Mellon robotics professor Howie Choset compares the technical challenge to jamming too much stuff into a piece of luggage, then trying to get that stuff to do something. Worse, he says, the smaller the actuators, the weaker they get. “You want to get as much actuation in as small a package as possible, but you’re already struggling to get as much packed as possible,” he says. “It is amazing that [Sachs] made this work.” 



Hernia repair, the first market Vicarious is targeting, is a huge one, with more than 2 million procedures a year in the U.S. Ventral hernias, common along the midline of the abdominal wall, account for 500,000 procedures and are highly complex. Standard repair involves attaching mesh to the abdominal wall, but it results in recurrence about 20% of the time, often requiring a more extensive fix. An advanced technique that involves tucking the mesh up against the rectus abdominis muscle reduces recurrence, but it’s difficult and can take up to four hours with current robots.&nbsp;



When Vicarious received the FDA breakthrough designation, it could perform this surgery in a cadaver in about half the time, Sachs says, and it has since cut that to under one hour. In a video demonstration of a ventral hernia repair, the Vicarious robot’s arms push mesh into the abdominal cavity and then quickly sew it up. The shorter surgery is less risky for patients and more cost-effective for hospitals.



Vicarious’ ambitions extend to other abdominal surgeries, including gallbladder procedures, for a total potential market of 39 million surgeries (only 3% of these are done with robots). That’s why Sachs, whose stake in Vicarious is worth $112 million, figures it needs just a fraction of the market to create a large company.&nbsp;



“The field has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and there is accepted wisdom that isn’t true,” says Tang, the SPAC investor. “You need to get this in the hands of people to show that it’s possible and it’s not a pipe dream.” 



By Amy Feldman with Aayushi Pratap

Screenshot 2021-07-28 at 17.58.27

Fantastic Voyage-Inspired Miniature Surgical Robot Aims To Revolutionize Abdominal Surgery

Microsoft&#8217;s move to add the role of board chairman to CEO Satya Nadella&#8217;s duties at the technology giant bucks a growing trend of companies separating the two jobs.



The number of companies whose CEO also held the title of chairman has declined steadily over the past three years at U.S. companies of all sizes, from the megacap corporations in the S&amp;P 500 to the smaller firms in the Russell 3000 index, according to new research by the Conference Board and analytics firm ESGAUGE.



The trend seems to be more pronounced among smaller companies. Only 36% of Russell 3000 companies had the CEO also serve as chair in 2020. That&#8217;s down from 41% percent in 2016.



“The importance of having an independent board has pushed many organizations to adopt a separation model,” says Matteo Tonello from The Conference Board. “The strong leadership skill sets in CEOs of very large S&amp;P 500 companies may be the reason why these companies are more reluctant to have the role separation,” he added.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Providing better oversight of company management and avoiding the sorts of conflicts of interest that sunk companies like WorldCom and Tyco, have largely been the reasons behind the role separations.



In companies that give CEOs a chair role as a reward for proving themselves as leaders, the gap is typically closer to two years. Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, never named chairman during his 14-year tenure as CEO of the software giant. For years, co-founder Bill Gates played that role. John Thompson became chairman when Nadella was named CEO in February 2014 and will return to his previous role of being lead independent director.&nbsp;



&nbsp;Microsoft rationalized Nadella&#8217;s promotion in a statement that suggested the board wanted a firmer focus on management priorities. “In this role, Nadella will lead the work to set the agenda for the board, leveraging his deep understanding of the business to elevate the right strategic opportunities and identify key risks and mitigation approaches for the board’s review,” said the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-board-of-directors-announces-role-changes-and-quarterly-dividend-301314220.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">statement.&nbsp;</a>



&nbsp;The spotlight on the trend of CEOs serving as board chairs became more intense after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Along with sinking many Internet startups, the stock crash made investors more skeptical about the cult of personality around many company leaders. Scandals at companies like Tyco, Enron, and WorldCom only reinforced a key question: Where was the board?&nbsp; Separating the chairman and CEO role was seen as a critical step in reinforcing board independence.



The debate continued, intensifying again after the 2008 financial crisis. In February 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued rules requiring listed companies to disclose their leadership structure and explain why it was appropriate. That exercise, along with pressure from shareholders, proxy advisory firms, and regulators, has prompted a slow but steady trend towards separating the chair and CEO roles. As Peter Crist, chairman of search firm Crist | Kolder, notes, “once those roles are decoupled, it’s rare to go back.”



The exception is when a successful CEO wants that role — or it’s treated as a promotion for a job well done. Mary Barra at General Motors, for example, followed a fairly typical pattern in being named chair of GM two years after holding the CEO slot. What’s unusual about Satya Nadella is the fact that he was CEO for seven years before being named chairman. That could indicate some frustration or perceived issues with the board’s ability to navigate through the current environment.&nbsp;



“The chair has more power to control the agenda and set the stage for conversations in the boardroom,” says Crist. “A CEO may say, ‘I need to lead and educate the board’ to get things done.”&nbsp;



That said, Crist rarely supports such a move. “I’m a strong believer in separating the chair and CEO roles … Not many board members can stand up to a strong CEO. Look at compensation trends. When is  compensation going to trend down? Never. It’s important to have as much autonomy as possible … If you’re a high-performing company and the CEO is viewed as a critical element of success, investors will basically shrug their shoulders when a CEO gets named chair of the board.”



By Aayushi Pratap, Forbes Staff

Microsoft Holds Annual Shareholder Meeting

Nadella’s Appointment As Microsoft Chair Bucks Governance Trend

With the social scene slowly crawling back to some semblance of normalcy, entrepreneur Bukky George-Taylor is cashing in with an app for customers keen on curated events and experiences in Nigeria.



If there is one person who knows what is hot and trendy in Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country, it is Bukky George-Taylor.



As the CEO and Founder of Robert Taylor Media Ltd., a boutique communications and events company based in Lagos, Nigeria, she is the force behind some of the biggest brand activations and campaigns in the country as well as providing representation for global brands looking to penetrate the African market. 



And her latest creation, a mobile app named CRAWL Africa, launched in Lagos in March, seems to address the need to adapt to a new social life in ‘a new normal’. She calls it Africa’s first social calendar app on a mission to revolutionize social experiences in Africa by presenting a collection of curated experiences for the discerning and upwardly-mobile African consumer.



“Finding information on where to go or contacting establishments in Nigeria and across Africa can be a chore. With no access to 411 or yellow pages in Africa, CRAWL provides you with all the accurate contact information to contact businesses and to tour your city,” says George-Taylor about the new app, which currently has over 100 businesses listed.



With a degree in African-American history from the University of Massachusetts in the United States, George-Taylor has built a firm that services the corporate, entertainment, lifestyle, fashion, beauty and health sectors. This has always ensured her access to the hottest events and happenings in Nigeria.



But why choose to launch an app when the retail and hospitality sector is still recovering from the effects of a raging pandemic?



“The app launched because our city [Lagos] started to open back up with restaurants and smaller events. One of the major reasons was because of travel restrictions; the app was birthed to promote tourism and encourage people to start exploring their own cities.



“The app also enables CRAWLers to save their favorite locations or experiences for future references with a single tap while making suggestions to users based on the preferences they select,&nbsp;such as budget, location, and more.”&nbsp;



As Nigeria’s social scene gradually reopens, the events listings will be reflected on the app. George-Taylor is now also looking at other cities in sub-Saharan Africa such as Accra, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg and Cape Town in which to launch CRAWL Africa.

5A6A8883 1 (1)

Want To Party In The New Normal? This Could Be How

A preview of some of the cool gadgets being rolled out by global players this year.



BY NAFISA AKABOR



IN LIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC, THE WORLD’S LARGEST consumer electronics show held annually in Las Vegas, which saw well over 171,000 attendees in 2020 – went all digital this year. At CES 2021, we saw a mix of interesting prototypes and products. Naturally, it included ways to combat Covid-19, such as body sensors from BioButton to detect flu-like symptoms; the MaskFone with built-in microphone for calls without removing a mask; and Alarm.com’s touchless video doorbell to help reduce the transmission of bacteria. 



As expected, there were plenty of robots but with UV lights to disinfect high-traffic areas such as the Coro-Bot, LG’s CLOi and the Adibot.



Gaming hardware company Razer introduced a prototype N95 mask called Project Hazel that is waterproof, scratch-resistant and transparent, which supports RGB lights that shine on the mouth. It features voice projection and can filter 95% of airborne particles.



Interestingly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art went virtual through the launch of The Met Unframed. It is a free smartphone-only experience of a digitally rendered art gallery including iconic masterpieces and the ability to play augmented reality games. It runs until mid-February.



There were also rollable phone screens showcased by LG and TLC, both with displays that expand as needed. However, the hype at CES this year was around updated television screens.



TVs unveiled at CES 2021 included brighter OLED screens, 8K support, laser TVs, mini-LED and micro-LED. The main difference between mini and micro LED is that the former can have more packed together in the same area and is backlit, whereas the latter is even smaller but self-illuminating.



HiSense unveiled a TriChroma Laser projection TV that displays “purer colors”, which is an improvement over RGB color and has brighter pixels, according to the company.



It also claims the technology offers 50% better color than cinemas, an industry that has been heavily impacted by the pandemic.



Meanwhile, Sony’s 2021 TV line-up will feature 8K support, OLEDs and 4K LED models. Bravias will be powered by its new Cognitive Processor XR that can divide the screen into various zones to detect its focal point, and analyze sound positioning to match what appears on screen.



The company says that while conventional AI can only detect and analyze picture elements like color, contrast and detail individually, the new processor can cross-analyze an array of elements at once, like our brain does. Sony is also the first manufacturer to announce support for the new Google TV platform, the successor to Android TV.



LG, on the other hand, has been busy with NanoCell TVs, 4K OLED monitors, QNED mini LED and second-generation panels called OLED Evo. It also announced a futuristic concept transparent TV that can be used in the bedroom, as a restaurant partition or on public transport to display route information.



The company will bring most of the line-up to South Africa, including the top of the range 8K Z1, the GX Gallery OLED and the 48-inch C1 model that was previously not available in the region, which is best for movies, sports and gaming.



Lance Berger, sales head for home entertainment at LG Electronics South Africa, says its 4K OLED monitors are suited for productivity, entertainment and gaming. “For those working from home, LG’s UltraFine Monitors are renowned for offering immersive viewing, but they also shine as productivity powerhouses, delivering a flexible workstation experience and easy setup.”



Berger says a USB-C port allows a 4K video display, data transfer and laptop/mobile device charging all at the same time over a single cable, which helps reduce cord clutter and increase efficiency.



Late in 2020, LG announced an exclusive partnership with Microsoft’s new Xbox Series X gaming console. This year, LG will offer a ‘game optimizer’ feature that fine-tunes the picture for consoles and PCs Berger says the feature gives gamers fast access to tweaks one would be likely to use, such as lag reduction and variable refresh rate. 



“Gamers can enable AI-based sound tuning for specific genres – it will adjust for a first-person shooter, role-playing game or even a real-time strategy title.”

Economic and financial impact during the Covid-19 health crisis deepens. Businesswoman with protective face mask checking financial trading data on smartphone by the stock exchange market display screen board in downtown financial district showing stock m

COVID-Inspired Consumer Tech?

Chika Madubuko is using technology to connect the at-home elderly to trained care-givers in Nigeria.



THE GLOBAL DIGITAL HEALTH MARKET IS growing by leaps and bounds and billions, and Chika Madubuko, the CEO and Founder of Greymate Care, is wanting to make the most of it whilst creating impact. With money not the only objective, it was the opportunity to serve those who needed quality healthcare the most that guided her.



Born in the northern region of Nigeria, Madubuko attended the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Anambra State, where she studied microbiology, before progressing to biotechnology and bioengineering at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom (UK). 



“All I wanted to do at the time is solve problems with bio-tech, with everyday biological systems, creating drugs and industrial solutions,” says Madubuko.



After graduating, the third-born child in a family of five children, decided to take a leaf out of her entrepreneurial parents’ handbook and venture into business development and sales in the UK before relocating to Nigeria to continue as a business development manager at Novus Agro, a multisided platform that organizes smallholder farmers into accessible groups for all those who want to transact with them.



By that stage, Madubuko had already caught the entrepreneurial bug and was looking for new direction. 



“When I was about to leave the UK, I toyed with the idea of creating a homecare startup and I was a certified care-giver but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it. Given my success in business development, I decided to give it a try and some people told me this was a real problem Nigerians were facing.”



The cultural norm in Nigeria is that when a loved one is sick, other members of the family take care of the person. Traditionally, this role was reserved for wives or mothers who stayed at home. However, with the significant gender shift in recent years and more women employed or entrepreneurial and no longer staying at home 24&#215;7, this has led to challenges for the elderly who need round-the-clock home care.



This is where Greymate Care comes in. Born out of the personal pain Madubuko faced when looking for a care-giver for her grandmother in the village, she based her service offering around providing trained professionals to care for vulnerable family members.



“Greymate Care is an online platform that connects the elderly to vetted care-givers right [in] the comfort of their homes… In Nigeria, there is no database where you can simply go and find a care-giver or someone who has been trained and background-checked. Greymate Care solves that problem by training people who want to become care givers and making sure they have guarantors and they are available to be deployed to your home. We reduce the turnaround time of finding a care-giver from about two months to let’s say an hour or maximum 48 hours.”



Each care-giver on the platform has to provide two references who act as guarantors for the individual and those references have to be in senior positions in credible organizations to qualify. That extra check has made Greymate Care a trusted provider in Nigeria, says Madubuko.



A recent article by Deloitte estimates that sub-Saharan Africa is forecast to become the fastest-growing region in the world in the area of e-health.



The proliferation of these services is mainly driven by rapid adaptation of mobile technology as well as the internet.



Deloitte estimates the mobile penetration rate for the continent is close to exceeding 80% with a large number of the population utilizing mobile phones for not only communication but also integrating business services.



Greymate Care is hoping to tap into this growing trend to provide access to health information and curb the shortage of good healthcare professionals especially in remote areas.



Greymate Care is hoping to tap into this growing trend to provide access to health information and curb the shortage of good healthcare professionals especially in remote areas.



For Madubuko, a major impetus for her new healthcare company is to provide employment through working with global agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme to train youth to become care-givers, an initiative that has created over 1,000 jobs on the e-health platform thus far.

Tag: Technology

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