Image Credit

Visualizing the world's collective intelligence, smart glasses or crowd sourced street-level map photos are some of the technologies the institution for public-private cooperation, World Economic Forum foundation, has selected to predict which companies and technologies are shaping the next evolutionary stage of the internet. 

Here they are:

Quid is a company currently active in 11 countries determined to analyze the world’s content. 

Imagine a platform that can explore and map huge amounts of data by reading millions of blog posts, news articles or patents and is able to organize the content visually to find hidden relationships between the data in order to answer strategic questions.

This is done with cutting edge technology and infrastructure in part on open-source, distributed search engine systems to index and categorize data using text processing algorithms built on top of cloud-based infrastructure to maximize search performance.

Natural language processing and models that run continuously using artificial intelligence extract valuable insights from millions of data points.

How do you decipher thousands of customer reviews at once? Watch how it’s done in 2 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zGxSVaoOc 

Magic Leap is a Florida based startup that might have completed the largest c-round financing in history. 

So far investors have dished out $1.4 billion. By superimposing 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects their technology is aiming to build the future of virtual reality.

While Google and Andreessen Horowitz were amongst the first to invest into Magic Leap it is considered to be the world’s most secret startup where a beta version has not even been released to developers.

The major players on the web like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and others are hiring engineers daily to be at the forefront of this coming artificial reality internet of experiences on the horizon.

As our lives are run on this network of information containing 60 trillion web pages with zetabytes of data interconnected by sextillions of transistors we merge into this new space of mixed reality or MR where virtual reality is overlaid on the real world.

Here are some visuals and an intro about what’s in store for us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkFWq_ipCc 

APX Labs develops software for smart glasses to enable users to collaborate with colleagues remotely  

We are entering a world where connected systems, machines, and analytic techniques like Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning are changing the future of work embedded in the 4th Industrial Revolution. 

Their skylight wearable platform tries to empower the people challenged with faster knowledge requirements through a transformative period of time when everybody tries to harness the enormous amounts of information created by the industrial Internet of Things to improve work process, product safety and quality.

Some of APX Labs customers like GE, Tesla or Boing use the technology to allow their workers to see tasks, watch how-to videos, communicate with management, and stream POV video for operations that require detailed tutorials or constant oversight from a manager or lead engineer.

While the Google Glass announcement in 2013 was not embraced by consumers, other tech companies like Microsoft and Sony are working with augmented reality headsets in gaming as well as in enterprise environments trying to improve production, error reduction and better tracking for various multi-billion dollar manufacturing companies.

APX Labs CEO Brian Ballard gives a brief introduction and overview of how he envisions a more connected workforce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sugEfjOlKg 

Mapillary is a swedish startup with the aim to use crowdsourced photos to create an open and more intelligent version of Google’s Street View to also improve cities infrastructure around the world.

The street-level photos anybody can take with their smartphones are free for educational, personal or NGO use.

Founder Jan Erik Solem believes there is a need for standalone businesses like Mapillary to make headway in the mapping market to avoid it to be consolidated into a few players as is traditionally the case. His company has joined forces with OpenStreetMap, the world’s biggest free, editable map service.

Jan explains his vision here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQwrg3RvfGk 

Slack which makes business-collaboration software is the planet's fastest-growing startup 

Slack had more than 1, 7 million users just twenty months after launch with 480,000 of them paying $8-$15 a month. 90,000-plus companies are using it while 97% percent of its new customers are referrals.

It brings all your communication together in one place via real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams that strive for improved productivity.

What is Slack?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RJZMSsH7-g 

Orbital Insight was founded by a NASA artificial intelligence researcher aiming to analyse satellite images to map social, economic and agricultural trends.

Founder James Crawford who also served as engineering director of Google Books recognized that the world needed similar technology to process photos from the planet equivalent to scanning and understanding millions of books with this dataset on the petabyte scale.

The company’s self-teaching algorithms count and measure roads, airplanes, clouds, haze, lakes, land, buildings, and oil tanks to provide an understanding of the world.

It can also count for example cars in a parking lot, to provide insight into how well a particular retail store is doing.

CEO James Crawford discusses machine vision and how it relates to deep learning and computer vision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_a1HSZy9MI 

PrecisionHawk - unmanned aircraft systems, artificial intelligence and remote sensing

PrecisionHawk, founded in 2010 by Bob Young, formerly CEO of open source software company Red Hat Inc., is an information delivery company that combines unmanned aircraft systems, artificial intelligence and remote sensing technologies to help businesses with decision making.

Its technology can secure sub 1cm per pixel imagery, a market-leading aerial resolution, built for a non-technical operator and can be learned to operate within a few hours.

The data platform provides autonomous transfer from the aircraft system into the cloud where it can be processed and analyzed on the Data Mapper software and accessed on a desktop or mobile device.

In 2015, drone tech investments broke records, due to mammoth rounds going to hardware manufacturers in the sector while PrecisionHawk’s focus is less on building and selling planes but rather on the platform for aerial data services.

PrecisionHawk’s Low Altitude Traffic and Airspace Safety system, lets drone operators get clearance to fly, track and verify their own flight operations to for example cover 300 acres in a 40 minute flight.

What is Precision Hawk?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J0Rf-LFvYY 

Advanced Threat Prevention Built on Artificial Intelligence 

Cylance is the world's first antivirus service that uses machine learning and AI to solve complex problems that might be too challenging or cost prohibitive for one or many persons - essentially to think like a cyber hacker.

In live demonstrations across the world Cylance was able to show how their next-generation antivirus stops over 99% of existing and never before seen malware threats while the industry average is usually able to stopp less than 40%.  

The system is predicting how malware, zero-day attacks, and other cyberthreats can attack networks, and then heading them off at the pass.

Founder Stuart McClure aims to protect every computer and endpoint anywhere with this technology.

Protecting your computer through mathematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YPbZKl71S8 

Legislative and Regulatory Analytics  using artificial intelligence

FiscalNote uses artificial intelligence and big data to deliver instant predictive analytics of governmental action to pinpoint impact by predicting likely outcomes for pending legislation and rulings.

Real-time predictive capabilities and enterprise collaboration and visualization tools allow government relations professionals to make faster decisions based on news, demographics, open data or campaign finance.

It's the first dedicated government relationship management system of its kind helping businesses and organizations to take control of their strategy. 

Co-founder and CEO Tim Hwang explains how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQIyStbkwUA 

Article inspired by this 1 min. overview video by the World Economic Forum.