Are you ready to see flying taxis? 🚁
How are your weeks going so far?
Ours have been refreshing to say the least, now that the Paris 🇫🇷 team is back from their off-site trip to Malta, continuing projects we have for the milestone and having a clear vision of what we envision for the company in 2022!
As part of refining our 2022 battle plan, the Bucharest 🇷🇴 team came over to our Paris office yesterday! More about this below ;)
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark reads:
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESCrisp Marketplace is live! 💬
Our mates at Crisp have launched their marketplace - where you can now build integrations and plugins with their platform! 🎉 Crisp is introducing 2 types of integrations: private for internal uses like data syncs and automated tasks, as well as public for public usage like Trello, Shopify, Github, and ones you create and share for other companies to use.
Crisp is a multichannel messaging platform that collates all of your conversations, between your company and your customers, into 1 inbox. These can all be from live chat on your website, emails, WhatsApp or even phone calls - allowing us to say goodbye to the tediousness of checking all these platforms, and helps ensure we don’t miss a beat 😉
🤸 FUN PRODUCT WE LOVEIf you love rope-skipping, you’ll love Smart Rope 🏃🏻♂️
We always get excited seeing normal things become smarter - like a fridge that can take stock for you, water bottles that can track your water intake, and skip-ropes that can count your skips and calories lost. This is what technology is for - to get rid of what computers or bots can do for us, so we can focus on our main goals!
Designed by a Korean IoT company, Tangram Factory, the Smart Rope can showcase your number of skips through LEDs embedded on the rope - counting up to 4 digits that you can watch in mid-air. The rope is designed to have 45°C angle handles, with 2x2 ball bearings to give you smooth jumps, and 350°C sensor tracking. This is pretty impressive, considering all the tech is housed in the handles!
All the other data that matters to you like calories lost and interval setting, can be seen and personalized through their app. The rope can also be used for a month from a single charge! If you’re looking for an easy, fun gift for a fellow skipper, this could be it 🎁
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTExpect to see flying taxis soon 🚁
Air mobility is becoming the next big thing - particularly electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles ("eVTOL")!
eVTOLs can come in many shapes and sizes (like this sexy 5-seater above), but are powered by electric motors and batteries. So they’re much like helicopters, but greener, cheaper and quieter. Companies innovating in the aero-space like Lilium and Joby Aviation, are building their own versions of eVTOLs - with 70-200 mph top speed that can only hold 2-5 people so far. This seems to be one of the biggest obstacles in making it more accessible and reasonable: capacity 👯♀️👯♀️👯♀️
Nonetheless, we can’t wait to unlock traffic-free skies with high speed commute, and zero emission electric power! How do you think we could carry more people on these flying vehicles?
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYWould you eat lab-grown meat? 🥓
Live-stock farming contributes to biodiversity loss, land and water degradation, coral reef degeneration, acid rain and deforestation. It is almost 1/4 of human produced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide - all just for our fancy meals! Now what if we could grow these in labs instead?
Companies like Eat Just in San Francisco have just received approval from the Singapore Food Agency for their cell-cultivated chicken last month. They’ve also been making egg products from mung bean, and are continuing to make amazing breakthroughs in the industry! 🚀
“It is real meat. Instead of needing billions of animals and all the land and the water, and all the rain forests you typically need to knock down to make that happen, we start with a cell. You can get the cell from a biopsy of an animal, a fresh piece of meat or a cell bank. Now, we don’t need the animal anymore.” - CEO of
Eat Just, Josh Tetrick.
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATEThe Bucharest 🇷🇴 Team visits our Paris 🇫🇷 hub
If you haven’t met them yet, meet Matei Grama (left) and Theodor Ghincea (middle)! They’ve been leading our Bucharest hub since September of 2020 - and have been absolute rockstars in making sure we’re supporting innovators to build their tech dreams and businesses in Romania 💙 They visited yesterday to be part of how we plan on taking over more markets worldwide - more about this later! ;)
If you’re ever in the Land of Dracula 🧛, make sure to hit them up, for projects you’d like to go through or even just talks of #entrepreneurship #techstartup life over coffee!
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!