Could solar power generate enough electricity for the whole world?
With 2 weeks into another Milestone (our 5-week cycles), the team is busy rocking and rolling on the projects we’ve continued and the new ones we’ve picked up. It’s pretty cool - we’re tapping into a new industry where technology isn’t the first go-to tool! We can’t wait to share them with you when they’re ready. For now, here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark reads:
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESBehind the Product releases Episode 2 featuring Victor Lang, Co-Founder and COO of Gini
If you find handling finances unnecessarily tedious or just a pain in the a**, you’re going to love Gini - and hearing about the journey of building it. Victor kickstarted Gini with his cousin Ray Wyand and together, broke down the actual problems of what makes financing and accounting difficult for small businesses (and big), and provide them with AI-powered forecasts, generated dashboards that matter to you and your team, and more.
The episode is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and all your favorite channels. Listen in and let us what you think!
🤸 FUN PRODUCT WE LOVESplit bills with your team, friends and housemates using Splitwise 💸
We love eating out and lunching together as a team, but splitting bills x ways is more troublesome than it has to be. Splitwise helps with all of this, and not just for lunching but also any costs that could be shared between you and another person. It allows you to create groups (for teams, different circles of friends, etc.), add anyone in, record down the costs of the group, and keep track of who owes who and how much. One person can just take the bill - then split it and sort it out later. You’ll need an account for each person though, but it takes seconds to sign up!
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTThis virtual obstacle course teaches real robots to learn to walk 🦿
This is one of the coolest things we’ve seen this week - a simulation of 4,000 dog-like robots wandering around a virtual obstacle course. Developed by researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and chipmaker Nvidia, this army of robots were made to train an algorithm that would then be used to control the legs of real robots. Could we use similar ways to train anything smart - like cars?
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYCould solar power generate enough electricity for the whole world? 💡
At least in theory, for now! Energy researchers from University College Cork in Ireland found that if the total surface area of rooftops in the world, some 0.2 million square kilometers (almost the size of the United Kingdom), had solar panels, they could generate 27 petawatt hours of electricity a year! That is more than the combined electricity consumption of the world in 2018 😱
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATESparkEvents: We’d love to hear your ideas! ✏️
We’re thinking of running more events: Give back with what we know through workshops, fun fireside chat panels with innovative entrepreneurs, or just do something fun with product development! Whether they’d be in-person events where our hubs are located (Hong Kong / Paris / Bucharest) or online events, we’d love to hear about what you think these events could focus on. What do you wonder about product development - How to bootstrap a product? How to get started with prototyping? How to do effective user research?
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!