While most discussion of aviation breakthroughs focuses on areas like VTOL, advanced fuels, electrification, or autonomy, weight is a universal concern. In commercial aircraft, lowering costs through methods including weight reduction has helped expand access to air travel from an estimated 383 million global air passengers in 1970 to almost 4.5 billion in 2019. In defense, weight reduction means greater range - increasingly critical with conflict looming in the Indo-Pacific. In recent decades, weight reduction has largely involved replacing metals with composites - most notably in Airbus’ A350 and Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, with total reduction estimated at 20%.
Today, two neural architectures scale to the limits of available data and compute:
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This paper draws on the work of economist Carlota Perez in developing the thesis that private technology companies are not in a speculative bubble. We argue instead that the world is currently in the "golden age" of the technological revolution set off by the invention of the internet.
This paper discusses a feedback cycle unleashed by the mobile ecosystem in the SMB space. As customer acquisition costs plummet for software vendors and SMBs benefit from new data and technology, hundreds of billions of dollars of value is being created.
This paper discusses the most important challenge faced by entrepreneurs building tech companies, and offers several foundational areas of focus for leaders tackling this issue.
This paper highlights the risks of investing blindly in what is popular and differentiates Smart Enterprise from ‘Big Data’.
This paper describes the urgent need and unprecedented opportunity for Smart Enterprise platforms to enable app-driven innovation and disrupt large, old-line industries. There exist a variety of network effects and winner-take-all dynamics during this one-time event in which the original, closed technology infrastructure in these industries is opened up, and upgraded to leverage big data.
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