Category Archives: News

Financial Times, News

Spain’s smaller start-up hubs play to their strengths to attract investment

Entrepreneur Félix Martín-Aguilar is looking overseas to expand his Málaga-based start-up. It’s not that he has anything against the Spanish city, his hometown, but Aliqindoi, a device as a service platform, is ready for the big time, he says, and in some ways his choice shows how Málaga is, too.

In the past, that might have meant seeking venture capital funding in Madrid or a buyer in Barcelona’s tech ecosystem, but Martín-Aguilar and colleagues are aiming beyond Spain thanks to a partnership between Málaga incubator BIC Euronova and Berkeley Skydeck, a start-up accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We have a chance to be a Silicon Valley company,” Martín-Aguilar says, although he intends to keep the Málaga location, with no need for a Madrid or Barcelona stepping stone. Had he not started his company at BIC Euronova “we probably wouldn’t even have heard about” the partnership, Martín-Aguilar says.

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IEEE Spectrum, News

Can Qubits Teleport Through Today’s Internet Lines?

 By LUCAS LAURSEN and MARGO ANDERSON

For decades, researchers have tried to squeeze quantum signals alongside classical signals in fiber optic cables. Quantum bits, however, are based on delicate quantum states of individual particles, which can be disrupted by thermal noise and other factors. 

Last month, Northwestern University engineers sent a pair of entangled photons more than 30 kilometers through a fiber that was also carrying a 400 gigabits-per-second classical signal. The entangled states then enabled a quantum data transfer process called teleportation. Quantum teleportation involves transmitting the quantum state of one particle onto another particle at a distant location, effectively allowing the quantum information (a.k.a. the quantum bits or qubits) to be “teleported” across space. 

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IEEE Spectrum, Lausanne, News

Can We Automate Eureka Moments?

JUST OUTSIDE LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND, in a meeting room wallpapered with patent drawings, Ioannis Ierides faced a classic sales challenge: demonstrating his product’s advantages within the short span of his customer’s attention. Ierides is a business-development manager at Iprova, a company that sells ideas for invention with an element of artificial intelligence (AI).

When Ierides gets someone to sign on the bottom line, Iprova begins sending their company proposals for patentable inventions in their area of interest. Any resulting patents will name humans as the inventors, but those humans will have benefited from Iprova’s AI tool. The software’s primary purpose is to scan the literature in both the company’s field and in far-off fields and then suggest new inventions made of old, previously disconnected ones. Iprova has found a niche tracking fast-changing industries and suggesting new inventions to large corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Deutsche Telekom, and Panasonic. The company has even patented its own AI-assisted invention method.

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IEEE Spectrum, News

European Satellite Burns Up for Science

Just how hot was that salsa? A European Space Agency (ESA) aircraft embarked on a mission on Sunday, 8 September, to answer this very question. The agency’s observational airplane—taking off from Easter Island, Chile—was geared up to collect data on a 24-year-old Earth observation satellite called Salsa as it burned up during atmospheric re-entry. The researchers wanted to know if Salsa would disintegrate completely or if it would instead take a long, slow tumble through the thickening air, with still unburnt pieces surviving the re-entry to splash into the ocean or make landfall somewhere. 

As of press time, the team is still analyzing its images and streams of instrument output from Sunday’s re-entry. But they do at least report success in gathering the data. “With the knowledge gained, ESA’s Space Debris team hope to improve current prediction models,” a Monday blog post from the researchers stated, “As well as learn more about how a satellite burns up.”

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