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 loading="lazy" decoding="async" 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 is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">&#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 loading="lazy" decoding="async" 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="auto, (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.

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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.

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Meet The Entrepreneur Who Is Changing the Game In Geriatrics

The fifth generation of mobile, wireless technology is about so much more than speed. What&#8217;s going against it- and in its favour?



CELLPHONE TOWERS ARE EASY TO SPOT. EVEN when not camouflaged as trees, flags or church steeples, they’re massive structures and what mobile networks use to provide high-speed, high-quality coverage. But when you find yourself in an area with terrible reception, or when your devices lose signal and switch from 4G to 3G, it’s likely the network is congested. 5G, the fifth generation of wireless technology, is about to change that forever.



“What we are doing is we’re using more of a particular natural phenomenon,” explains Brett StClair, the CEO and co-founder of Teraflow.ai, a global data, and machine learning engineering consultancy. “5G uses spectrum or waves. It uses the same waves that we’ve been using since the sixties to deliver television on. It’s very clean, it’s very high capacity&#8230; and all we’ve been using it for is to send an image through!”



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-microwave-effect">The microwave effect</h4>



The idea of 5G networks connecting cities and millions of devices together sounds revolutionary but it’s also been met with trepidation. Protests have broken out around the world in a bid to stop 5G being rolled out, fearing that the next generation of mobile connectivity could have serious health ramifications and impact the environment negatively. Conspiracy theories circulating around 5G and the coronavirus pandemic saw activists in the United Kingdom burning down phone masts.



“With 5G, one of the things that come about is that we have to make the waves go further than they normally can. One of the words The fifth generation of mobile, wireless technology is about so much more than speed. What’s going against it – and in its favor? that’s used to describe that is radiation. There’s a term called non-ionizing, which means it’s not generating enough energy to be harmful to anything, let alone a human being. The photon energy is so low that it can’t harm anyone,” explains SqwidNet’s Managing Director, Phathizwe Malinga.



Research conducted by Christopher Collins, a professor of radiology at New York University, showed that unlike the electromagnetic waves used in X-rays, MRIs and ultrasounds, which are powerful enough to break chemical bonds apart (and cause serious damage), the waves used by 5G, Bluetooth and even Wi-Fi are weak.



They cannot even penetrate skin.



This also explains why 5G is very different – and possibly safer – than its predecessor. It may be the next generation of mobile connectivity but with 5G, we won’t need more fake trees.



5G towers differ both physically and functionally. They’re so small that they can be installed on light poles or even traffic lights.



But because 5G data is transmitting on an entirely different part of the radio spectrum to 4G, more of these ‘mini towers’ are needed to cover the same amount of space.



“Unfortunately to get those 5G speeds, you’ll need a lot more of these towers. I’m imagining municipalities will hold off as long as possible,” adds Malinga. “As we start moving into this space, a lot of the networks are starting to get better understanding that this is a multi- connectivity space. We need to start to create combination-use cases that will result in a better-looking city.”



Vodacom was the first operator to launch a mobile and fixed 5G service in South Africa in May 2020 after launching Africa’s first fixed 



5G commercial service in Lesotho in 2018. The mobile operator’s plan is to deploy 5G coverage throughout its African footprint over the next few years, provided it can access the necessary spectrum within each market.



“5G is also capable of supporting entirely new and advanced-use cases such as challenging enterprise applications that will improve their operational efficiency, sustainability, and/or health and safety,” explains Vodacom’s executive head of media relations, Byron Kennedy.



“Some examples of such applications include providing connectivity for remotely piloted vehicles in the mining and transportation sectors, industrial robots in the manufacturing sector, and environmental monitoring within the energy and utility sector.”



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-beyond-the-smartphone">Beyond the smartphone</h4>



While 5G technology can deliver higher data speeds and a massive network capacity with a greater number of connected devices, one of its biggest problems is range. “What it does from an impact point of view is it excludes



a lot of the population. If you’re not living in the city, 5G might not be a reality for you. But luckily, there is this good headway being made on the fibre side. So you can almost think of 5G and fibre being easily substitutable from a business point of view,” adds Malinga.



Because 5G has the potential to increase how data is moved, it will enable a wide range of new business applications and use cases that go far beyond the smartphone. The industrial application of 5G, especially when it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT) and advancing AI, is often overlooked. By 2025, there will be 1.2 billion 5G connections worldwide according to the GSMA, a trade body of global mobile network operators.



“5G will change how we manage our compute loads,” explains StClair, “no matter where you are in the world, what 5G enables you to do is bring machine learning and AI right to the edge of the network.”



When data is stored in the cloud, it most likely means that it is sitting in a server farm thousands of kilometers away. Big cloud players like Google, Facebook and Apple all have massive data centers in Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden.



“Even though you have bigger bandwidth to your device, if the service is in America, you’re still going to suffer from something called latency. Even if it’s 300 milliseconds, in today’s world, that’s a lot of time lost and even billions of transactions,” adds StClair. “We have so much data in the world. And with 5G, we’re essentially going to multiply that by a factor of 1,000. That amount of data needs to be processed but we don’t process it like we used to process data stored in a database. 



What we do now is we run machine learning models to be more predictive to certain situations. The power of 5G is the ability to deploy models closer to the end-user.”



Bringing technology closer using 5G means that we’re able to connect things that are far away from a business but act as though they are a part of a business. That’s why 5G is so much more than a simple step-up in network speeds, it’s a game-changer when it comes to connectivity.



“In farming, you can connect your cattle&#8230; you can connect boreholes that are far away and know how much water is inside. In towns, you can connect vehicles or even water meters and start detecting, in real-time, leaks and stop water from spreading,” says Malinga.



“Ultimately, we need a device or a sensor that we can attach to something that we care about. 5G and IoT are complimentary, necessary, but they don’t do the same thing. If we introduce these technologies to the people who can afford [them], they can fix and address their quality of life themselves, and then ride that exponential curve to a point where they start becoming small businesses that become large businesses that eventually become global players.”



-by Tiana Cline

5g chip ,3d render

The Next Wave Of Connectivity

TOPLINE: Shares of Airbnb have plunged 25% since their monster trading debut on Thursday, and analysts forecast the stock could slump further as recently priced initial public offerings flash warning signs in the market.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h4>



After a bearish analyst call on Monday, shares of Airbnb are falling 5% today pushing shares down to about $124 apiece, or 25% lower than their trading day high of $165.



The fortunes of the firm&#8217;s three cofounders–Nathan Blecharcyzk, Joe Gebbia and CEO Brian Chesky–have plunged nearly $5 billion combined since&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/12/10/thanks-to-ipo-pop-airbnbs-three-billionaire-cofounders-more-than-double-their-net-worths-in-a-single-day/">Thursday&#8217;s close</a>&nbsp;to about $8.5 billion for each of Blecharcyzk and Gebbia and $9.5 billion for Chesky.



In a note downgrading Airbnb&#8217;s stock on Monday, Gordon Haskett analyst Robert Mollins said Airbnb&#8217;s IPO surge &#8220;more than stretched&#8221; the firm&#8217;s share prices, which have lifted Airbnb&#8217;s valuation to roughly two-times estimated bookings in 2022.



At that rate, Airbnb&#8217;s valuation, relative to its revenue potential, is more than three times higher than the average among competing online travel agencies like Expedia and Booking.com, Mollins further noted.



He downgraded the firm to underperform from a pre-IPO buy rating, but upped his price target to $103 from $77.



Wall Street&#8217;s still generally bearish on Airbnb&#8217;s current price levels: three analysts covering the stock give an average one-year price target of about $96, representing nearly 25% downside to current prices.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-crucial-quote">CRUCIAL QUOTE&nbsp;</h4>



“An overwhelming majority of investors we’ve spoken with have been unable to justify Airbnb’s valuation premium relative to [other online travel firms] and expressed interest in realizing their quick gains,” Mollins wrote in a note to clients on Monday. “Investors&#8230;&nbsp; like Airbnb’s business model and want to be long-term holders, but are now looking at selling the stock because they no longer feel comfortable owning it.”



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h4>



Shares of Airbnb skyrocketed as much as 120% during the home rental giant&#8217;s long-awaited first day of trading, propelling the firm&#8217;s market cap to more than five times its last private market valuation of $18 billion in April. Despite the damper the pandemic is putting on the travel industry, Airbnb shares were priced at a higher than expected $68 on Wednesday, allowing the firm to raise roughly $3.5 billion in its initial public offering. That bested the $3.4 billion DoorDash raised just one day earlier to make Airbnb&#8217;s public market debut the third-largest of 2020. DoorDash shares have tanked nearly 20% since Wednesday.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-number">BIG NUMBER</h4>



$103 billion.That&#8217;s how high Airbnb&#8217;s market capitalization got on Thursday–higher than all publicly traded U.S. hotel chains combined. It&#8217;s now at about $73 billion.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tangent">TANGENT</h4>



On Saturday, fintech startup Affirm&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/affirm-postpones-initial-public-offering-sources-say-11607801619" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pushed</a>&nbsp;its IPO back to January at the earliest, as people familiar with the matter cited hesitancy around the &#8220;extreme&#8221; first-day pops of Airbnb and Doordash as well as delays sparked by an influx of listing requests at the Securities and Exchange Commission. That echoed concerns from gaming company Roblox just one day earlier, when the firm&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/roblox-delays-ipo-until-next-year-11607742940?mod=article_inline" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told employees</a>&nbsp;that its planned December IPO would instead happen early next year given the uncertainty around recent IPO valuations.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h4>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/12/10/thanks-to-ipo-pop-airbnbs-three-billionaire-cofounders-more-than-double-their-net-worths-in-a-single-day/">Thanks To IPO Pop, Airbnb’s Three Billionaire Cofounders More Than Double Their Net Worths In A Single Day</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/12/10/airbnb-ipo-shares-valuation-billion-more-than-marriott-hilton-hyatt/">Airbnb Skyrockets 120% In IPO, Valuation Blows Past $100 Billion–More Than Marriott, Hilton And Hyatt Combined</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/12/09/doordash-ipo-shares-first-day-of-trading/">DoorDash IPO: Shares Surge 80% At Start Of Trading, Boosting Valuation To $60 Billion In Year’s Third-Largest IPO</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://qz.com/1945769/is-there-a-bubble-in-us-tech-stocks-and-will-it-pop-in-2021/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Is a massive bubble in US tech stocks coming—or is it already here?</a> (Quartz)



&#8211;By Jonathan Ponciano, Forbes Staff

Airbnb Open LA – “Introducing Trips” Reveal

Airbnb Stock Down 25% Since IPO, Three Billionaire Cofounders Lose $5 Billion In 3 Trading Days

Much of the coverage of Salesforce’s decision to bid for Slack&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/12/01/its-official-salesforce-buying-slack-for-28-billion-taking-on-microsoft-with-benioffs-biggest-deal-yet/">in a transaction valued at $27.7 billion</a>&nbsp;has focused on the intense rivalry with Microsoft, whose Teams collaboration software offering has been outpacing Slack’s growth during the pandemic. But a significant shift is taking place in IT planning that creates an even more powerful commercial logic for the combination of the two software companies—and it’s a shift that’s likely to fuel more enterprise tech M&amp;A in the year ahead.



CIOs and other tech leaders are now looking towards a future in which many more employees are allowed to work remotely for all or part of every week than before the Covid-19 pandemic began. A recent report from research firm Forrester estimates that while less than a tenth of companies will let all employees choose if they want to work remotely once the pandemic is over, 60% will stick with a hybrid model involving a mix of office-based and remote work. This shift is going to have a significant impact on the tech stacks CIOs are building to support workers.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tired-of-tool-fatigue">Tired of tool fatigue</h3>



One of the top priorities is to reduce what Sathish Muthukrishnan, the chief information, data and digital officer of Ally Financial, a financial services company with a market cap of almost $12 billion, describes as software “tool fatigue”. He’s referring to the stress and frustration employees experience when they are forced to launch many different software applications to get their jobs done and then to toggle frequently between them.



This issue was already a concern before Covid-19, but the shift to mass remote work—and the flood of new software applications to support the move—has driven it much higher up the agenda at a time when the pandemic has generally heightened stress levels amongst employees.



Hence growing demand amongst tech leaders for everything from collaboration tools to data analytics capabilities and project management software to work seamlessly together. “In a pre-pandemic world this level of integration was not as critical as it is now, when the ability to interact is essential for the productivity of a distributed workforce,” said Nicola Morini Bianzino, global chief technology officer of professional services giant EY, in emailed comments to&nbsp;Forbes.



Edward Wagoner still sees a role for best-of-breed applications in workforce tech stacks, as do many other tech leaders. The digital CIO of JLL Technologies, a division of $7 billion real estate company JLL, nevertheless acknowledges there’s a challenge to get these standalone services to work more seamlessly together so employees aren’t frustrated as they shuttle between offices and remote locations. “All the tools are great,” said Wagoner, “but often the experience of going back and forth isn’t good.” Larger platforms with more integrated offerings such as a Salesforce-plus-Slack combo should be able to reduce this kind of friction.



Tool fatigue has big implications for security as well as productivity: The more complex the web of independent applications that IT teams have to knit together, the greater the risk security holes will be missed. CIOs also worry that people working remotely tend not to be as mentally attuned to security issues as they are in offices. More tightly integrated software platforms should in principle be easier to secure.



For Ally’s Muthukrishnan, security is “the first bucket” he thinks about as he’s building his company’s workforce tech stack, which also includes collaboration tools and software such as virtual whiteboards that can be used by workers in and out of the office for innovation projects. Muthukrishnan’s constantly on the lookout for ways to reduce friction between different applications. “The key is how well do they integrate with each other.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-a-front-end-for-the-future-of-work">A front-end for the future of work</h3>



Given CIOs’ shifting tech priorities for supporting hybrid work, the bid for Slack looks like a smart strategic move—even though Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had previously&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/11/30/salesforce-slack-acquisition-marc-benioff/?sh=64473ce211de">tried to cool expectations around any deal activity</a>. After starting life as a provider of cloud-based applications for sales teams, Salesforce has progressively expanded into other areas such as marketing, customer success and, more recently, data analytics with its $15.7 billion purchase of Tableau Software.



Integrating Slack will add communication and collaboration capabilities to its platform, which should make it even more attractive to CIOs concerned about software tool fatigue and other issues. In a blog post commenting on the deal, Aaron Levie, CEO of enterprise cloud company Box, said the combination with Slack will give Salesforce “a new front-end for the future of work” that connects the front office, back office and customers together in a single platform.



Levie’s description will resonate with corporate tech leaders, but the deal also raises the pressure on smaller, independent software companies such as Box, Dropbox and Asana to expand via acquisitions to meet CIOs’ rising expectations for secure, fatigue-free software platforms that can effectively support hybrid office-remote work strategies. Those that don’t step up could find themselves overshadowed by the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft—or perhaps being bought by them.



-By Martin Giles, Forbes Staff

Salesforce To Buy Software Maker Slack For $27.7 Billion

Salesforce’s Mega Bid For Slack Comes As CIOs Rethink Tech Needs For The Future Of Work

When CIOs talk about platforms, they’re usually referring to digital rather than political ones. But as Americans head to the polls, corporate tech leaders should be paying close attention to what a second Trump administration, or a first Biden one, could have in store for them.



The outcome of the contest will have profound consequences for skilled immigration, data privacy regimes, the regulation of AI and other issues such as cybersecurity that all matter to CIOs. It will also shape how America deals with China as a competitor and trading partner—a fraught relationship that’s sparked concerns over high-tech supply chains and the security of 5G communications networks<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/10/09/huawei-rivals-nokia-ericsson-27-billion-us-sanctions/#7249ea2bde48">&nbsp;using equipment from Huawei and other Chinese firms</a>.



The election will also help determine whether America can sustain its role as a global innovation leader. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank with close links to the tech industry, points out that the U.S. would need to spend at least an additional $100 billion a year, or an increase of around 80% over current spending levels, just to match what it was investing in research as a percentage of GDP back in the 1980s.



“The reality is that America is no longer the global innovation leader, at least on a per capita basis, and it risks losing out to China over the next decade or two,” the ITIF wrote in a recent study of the likely impact of the upcoming election on tech policy. “Whether or not the two major parties understand this threat and want to prioritize it is unclear.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Tackling China</h3>



What is clear is that tensions over high-tech trade with China are likely to remain high under either a second Trump administration or a first Biden one. But the tactics a Biden presidency would adopt are likely to be quite different to those of its predecessor.



Speaking at the<a href="https://www.forbes.com/connect/event/forbes-cio-next-virtual-episode1/">&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;CIO Next virtual summit</a>&nbsp;held on October 27, Darrell West, an expert on technology policy at the Brookings Institution, said that if President Trump is re-elected, he’s likely to continue his aggressive and unpredictable, go-it-alone policy towards pressuring China for trade concessions. “A company may wake up one day thinking they are a friend of the administration and the next day become a target,” said West.



A Biden presidency is likely to keep up the pressure on China, too, but will almost certainly create a clear set of processes for handling trade negotiations on high-tech and other issues. West thinks it will also want to forge a more united front with the European Union on dealing with the Chinese. While this approach may make it easier for CIOs and other executives to assess supply chain risks in dealing with Chinese manufacturers, both presidential candidates are likely to maintain U.S. efforts to keep hardware from China and other suppliers out of 5G networks in America and other countries on national security grounds.



With Chinese companies pulling ahead in areas such as<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonytrippe/2020/08/31/china-is-gunning-to-be-the-world-leader-in-ai-chips-while-restricting-exports/#392b0c186d4e">&nbsp;chips that power artificial intelligence (AI) applications</a>, the issue of how the U.S. government can better support domestic innovation will be on the table no matter who becomes president. Neither candidate looks likely to bring government spending as a percentage of GDP back to 1980s levels, but the Biden camp has pledged to invest an additional $300 billion over four years to help close some of the gap. If he is re-elected, President Trump is likely to continue his current policy of reducing overall government support on R&amp;D while boosting investment<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/martingiles/2020/08/14/us-to-boost-ai-quantum-funding-in-2021/#291bef1521dd">&nbsp;in some key areas such as AI, quantum information science and advanced manufacturing</a>.



On cybersecurity, both candidates would likely step up efforts to protect U.S. companies and critical infrastructure such as electrical grids from cyberattacks. West thinks a Biden administration could press for a kind of Geneva convention on cyber arms control, whereas if President Trump is re-elected his administration will keep pursuing a more unilateral approach. If the Democrats win the presidency and perhaps carry the Senate too, they may also push for a mandatory regime that requires companies to report hacks to a national database. Republicans, on the other hand, are more likely to leave breach reporting requirements to individual states.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Importing talent</h3>



Finding enough skilled workers is one of CIOs’ biggest concerns, so they will be hoping for an easing of restrictions on H1-B visas and other channels that the present Trump administration has been restricting.



Robert Atkinson, the president of the ITIF, thinks a Biden administration will expand skilled immigration whereas a second Trump one is likely to extend the current crackdown. However, he cautions that if Biden wins, companies can’t count on a swift increase in H1-Bs. “There are a lot of folks on the left [of the Democratic party] who have pushed back on H1-Bs because these are seen as undermining U.S. wages,” he says. “You could instead see an expansion of other avenues and vehicles to bring in high-skilled workers.”



Atkinson also thinks that if Biden carries the White House, CIOs could find<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/marksettle/2020/10/20/the-proper-path-to-achieving--automation-at-scale/#2f8df7ef2a4a">&nbsp;robotic process automation (RPA) strategies</a>, which use software to take over tasks from workers, under intense political scrutiny because of fears these will destroy jobs and crater wages. “In a Biden administration, companies will have to be much more careful and cautious about how they portray this. Trump doesn’t mind automation; he minds offshoring.”



Companies’ automation drives could be blunted in other ways. For instance, tax reforms in 2018 made it possible for businesses to immediately deduct the entire cost of equipment purchases from taxable income; previously, they had generally only been allowed to write off a portion of the cost in a single year. This encouraged CIOs and other executives to accelerate purchases of everything from robots to servers. However, the changes will come up for review in a couple of years and a Biden administration would be less likely to push for an extension.



If Biden wins the election, CIOs will almost certainly face tougher rules on data privacy. Both candidates are in favor of a national consumer privacy regime to replace the present mix of different state ones, but the Democrats are more likely to push for<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynerash/2020/06/29/ccpa-enforcement-to-begin-on-wednesday-july-1-2020--steps-to-get-ready/#5650f7475f8b">&nbsp;a California-style framework</a>&nbsp;with significant compliance costs and hefty fines for rule-breakers. They are also more likely to support a national regime to regulate the use of artificial intelligence for things such as facial recognition systems.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Tech under the microscope</h3>



No matter which of the presidential candidates ends up in the White House after the election, it’s clear that the world of technology is going to face more intense scrutiny than ever before.



CIOs will want to keep an especially close watch on who ends up leading key government agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, which are responsible for oversight on antitrust policy. The Justice Department’s recent move to sue Google<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/20/justice-department-suing-google-for-antitrust-violations/#7e1f4243dbb8">&nbsp;for alleged antitrust violations</a>&nbsp;is likely to be followed by actions against Facebook and possibly other tech firms. It will also be important to watch who is chosen to sit on key congressional bodies such as the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee, which issued a report earlier this month<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/10/06/long-awaited-house-report-recommends-breaking-up-big-tech/#46776205c831">&nbsp;flagging multiple potential areas of potential concern</a>, including Amazon’s significant share of the cloud computing market.



The Brookings Institution’s West neatly encapsulated where things stand in his closing remarks at the Forbes CIO Next event. “Over the last 30 years, the mantra has been ‘permissionless innovation,’” he said, referring to a relatively laissez-faire view of technology’s impact on the economy and society. “That era is coming to an end. We’re going to have more public engagement [on tech issues], more public oversight, and more public regulation.”



-By Martin Giles, Forbes Staff

Man voting online

Here’s How The U.S. Election Could Impact Automation, Cybersecurity, Data Privacy And Other Key Issues CIOs Care About

Vimal Kumar, Chief Executive for Retail and Business Banking, Digital &amp; CX, at Absa Regional Operations, on the bank’s digital transformation journey across Africa and the technology driving financial access in the continent’s communities.



&#8220;THE 30cm BETWEEN YOUR EYE AND YOUR MOBILE device…that is the small, yet powerful space we want to own,” says Vimal Kumar, setting the tone for our interview on digital banking – and the future of self-service and DX.



As Chief Executive for Retail and Business Banking, Digital &amp; CX, at Absa Regional Operations, Kumar has been part of the bank’s rebranding strategy in Africa since its separation from the British parent brand, Barclays Plc. He expands further on his “30cm” philosophy



“The young customers of today don’t have the time to look for a branch, stand in queues, and speak to banking staff. They want everything on their mobile that’s instant, fast, and agile. It’s ‘digital-first, mobile-first’,” Kumar continues.



From his upstairs study at home in Sandton, Johannesburg, he has a clear view of the African sky. The months of remote working enforced during South Africa’s Covid-19 shutdown have meant being away from these very skies. For a man relentlessly clocking air miles traveling into the rest of the continent, the pandemic has meant a period of quiet reflection and quick recalibration.



“In the last hundred days or so, I have reconciled with ‘the new normal’ but I do miss traveling into the heart of Africa. It’s a very vibrant continent, a very young continent. I learn a lot when I am with young people. This time has given me a very different perspective,” says Kumar.



Having worked for 25 years in retail banking across Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and now Africa, what Kumar sees as unique to the continent is its ease of adoption of new technology.



This is what charged him and his team into creating the bank’s digital transformation journey in Absa’s regional operations, “not entirely focused on being cool but solving customer needs”, providing “not just financial inclusion but financial access” to people in the remotest parts of the continent.



Doing so through partnerships with such entities as MTN (telco) and JUMO (fintech), the underbanked communities in Africa, who have never experienced banking in their lives, have been able to access financial services, says Kumar.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">&#8220;Hyper-personalizing CX through a combination of digitalization and big data, and making it a segment of one…&#8221;</blockquote>



In the process, it also meant “hyper-personalizing” CX through a combination of digitalization and big data, and making it “a segment of one” where every customer is unique. “The experience we are trying to create on the mobile app and web platform will soon mirror the experience of one transacting at the bank’s branch. This means we have to constantly improve the functionality and user experience on these alternate channels so customers never feel the need to visit a branch.”



This aspect was one of the core pillars of the radical transformation that came shortly after Barclays announced in 2016 that it would be exiting Africa. The separation journey, as well as the digital one, took three years and involved entire teams. But Kumar notes the focus of their digital transformation philosophy has remained consistent – improving self-service to the customer. “So, technology is really driving financial access to the most underprivileged in our societies… this is important, because, as I said, we needed to come much closer to the real communities in Africa.”



The proximity with colleagues and clients during Covid-19 has been challenging and “psychologically, more difficult to accept”, however, life has to go on, says Kumar, and though it is not a preferred way to operate, the digital transformation journey must continue – for Africa’s sake.



<h4 class="has-text-align-center wp-block-heading">ACCOLADES</h4>



2019: ‘Financial Innovator Of The Year’ award by Finnovex 2020: ‘Banking CEO Of The Year – Africa’ and ‘Business Transformation CEO Of The Year – Africa’ awards by Business Worldwide

Untitled-1

THE FUTURE OF SELF-SERVICE

Many American Netflix users will need to pay $1 extra for a subscription, the company announced Thursday, as the streaming giant deals with slowing U.S. growth after an explosion in new subscribers at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">KEY FACTS</h4>



A standard subscription now costs $14 a month rather than $13, and a premium plan (which allows users to stream content on more devices simultaneously) jumped from $16 to $18, though the company’s $9 basic standard-definition plan remains unchanged.



The price hikes will take effect immediately for new subscribers, and existing users will see their monthly bills increase over the next two months, with a warning 30 days ahead of time, a Netflix spokesperson told&nbsp;Forbes.



The company said it is raising prices to underwrite an expansion in original movies and shows.



Netflix last hiked its U.S. prices in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-raising-cost-to-13-a-month-its-biggest-hike-ever-2019-01-15" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">January of 2019</a>, boosting the cost of a standard plan from $11 to $13 per month.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">BIG NUMBER</h4>



73.08 million. That’s the total number of U.S. Netflix subscriptions as of last month, according to the company’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.netflixinvestor.com/financials/quarterly-earnings/default.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">third quarter</a>&nbsp;earnings report. Fewer than&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/20/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-after-surging-during-pandemic/?sh=690475e7244e">half</a>&nbsp;of all Netflix subscribers live in the United States, the result of rapid international growth.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">KEY BACKGROUND</h4>



Netflix saw&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52376022" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">surging demand</a>&nbsp;earlier this year, after the coronavirus closed most movie theaters and sent bored, homebound customers in search for entertainment. Almost 26 million new people worldwide subscribed to Netflix in the first half of 2020, the largest growth spurt in Netflix’s history, and the company rushed to add new shows at a rapid clip. This expansion&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/20/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-after-surging-during-pandemic/?sh=690475e7244e">stalled</a>&nbsp;between July and September, when the company added just 2.2 million new subscribers, and Netflix expects growth to remain more modest for the next few months.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">TANGENT</h4>



Netflix faces stiff competition from smaller streaming services, including longstanding rivals like Disney’s Hulu and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/new-streaming-services-2019-2020.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">newer services</a>&nbsp;like Disney+ and NBCUniversal’s Peacock. Most of these services&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/best-streaming-services-cost-15166523" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">charge</a>&nbsp;less than $10 per month, making Netflix a pricey option in a crowded market. Still,&nbsp;<a href="https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/Netflix,-Inc.,-Q3-2020-Earnings-Call,-Oct-20,-2020.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Netflix executives believe</a>&nbsp;price increases will not slow their growth as long as the company continues adding enough new shows to justify the cost of a subscription.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h4>



“We understand people have more entertainment choices than ever and we’re committed to delivering an even better experience for our members,” Netflix spokesperson Katy Dormer told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;in an email. “We’re updating our prices so that we can continue to offer more variety of TV shows and films.”



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">FURTHER READING</h4>



<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/29/21540346/netflix-price-increase-united-states-standard-premium-content-product-features" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Netflix is raising the price of its most popular plan to $14 today, premium tier increasing to $18 (The Verge)</a>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/20/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-after-surging-during-pandemic/?sh=690475e7244e">Netflix Subscriber Growth Slows After Surging During Pandemic (Forbes)</a>



-By Joe Walsh, Forbes Staff

Tag: Technology

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