FYI - For Your Innovation

The ostensible premise behind social media platforms is to enable people to connect online, but this gets jeopardized by their attention economy architecture and paid advertising algorithms. Today’s guests are Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jared Geller and they join us to speak about their platform, HitRecord, an online community built around creative collaboration. HitRecord offers artists of all kinds a platform to share their artwork or idea, and open it up to the input of other artists, thereby producing a trail that records the work’s progression much like GitHub does with code. In our conversation with Joseph and Jared, we hear about HitRecord’s journey from its early days as a production company to its current state as a tech company, offering decentralized access and editing capabilities to creative projects around the world. Our guests talk about some of the functionality on HitRecord and weigh in on some of the limitations of social media. We also explore the future of the movie industry, the blurring lines between creativity and technology, and what kinds of creative and community-driven art forms could grow out of quarantine and the pandemic.

Make sure to check out their latest project “Create Together #WithMe”, a new Youtube series about making art and community out of uncertain times.

Today on the show, we welcome Austin Petersmith, Founder and CEO of Capiche. Capiche is a startup that aims to bring transparency and trusted reviews to the world of enterprise software. The SaaS industry has blossomed in recent years with dozens of tools being used across productivity, communication, databases and DevOps. In this episode, Austin gives an overview of how the modern software as a service (SaaS) industry was born and what’s coming down the pike. We hear the gap in the enterprise software customer experience that Capiche aims to fulfill and what the benefits are of having a communal space that fosters a mentality of users-helping-users. We also discuss the range of software available to us today and how the traditional top-down decision-making power within these structures is stretching across all employees into the hands of the individual. With more and more people settling into remote work during the coronavirus lockdowns, we explore the importance of having trust within organizations and why this is the most important leadership quality that needs to be practiced, right now.

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In this virtual, remote, distant world we need to make sure that the technologies that support us can transfer information that is accurate, safe and trusted. For today’s episode, we had Dr. Alex Cahana join us to speak about the role Distributed Ledger Technologies will play in shaping business, health systems, and definitions of community in the post-pandemic world. Dr. Cahana is the Chief Medical Officer and Market Lead for ConsenSys Health. His experience is in military, healthcare and most recently, blockchain, and he believes that by ‘blockchainizing’ healthcare we can transform people from passive health service consumers into active, self-sovereign health and wealth producers. In today’s show, we discuss the importance of secure, trustworthy data to business and healthcare and how blockchain-based systems are ushering in a new era in this regard. Dr. Cahana tells listeners about what blockchain’s ability to remove ‘fakeness’ means for securing systems in health, law, news and more. Our conversation also covers the global pandemic and what it has emphasized, what we can learn from it, and how technologies that are being implemented now might be here to stay once things blow over. A key takeaway here is that surviving the pandemic should not come at the cost of our privacy. We discuss his efforts with “Failure Is Not an Option” (FINO) as far as their ventures toward reshaping business through blockchain, and the incentives blockchain could provide to people so that they can take a more active role in their own healthcare. Most importantly, Dr. Cahana’s message is that blockchain is a mindset. It represents a mentality where we realize that we have to work together and it enables a behavioral economy which makes things so secure that trust gets taken out of the picture. Tune in for Dr. Cahana’s big picture, cross-disciplinary insights.

From manufacturing to universities, companies and institutions are in turmoil across the board. During the time of COVID-19, businesses are being forced to look for better, faster, or cheaper solutions to the problems that they’re facing. Increasingly new technologies can provide help. We take a look at how businesses, brands, organizations, public services, and institutions are having to make drastic shifts in order to survive and adopt new solutions such as drones, 3D printing, autonomous driving, and online education. As the world makes behavioral shifts to the “new normal,” we are seeing how people are beginning to move toward automation in multiple areas of their lives – be it food delivery, pursuing education, or catching a ride. The entire world is at a tipping point where we are being forced to embrace the move to automation… who will be left behind?

The current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has saturated media across the globe. The information available to us is vast, expansive, and can be all-consuming. But a lot of this information is, understandably, geared heavily toward medical and social topics. In this episode, we explore the impact of covid-19 on fintech companies. We ask the question, what does this mean payment methods and the future of transactions across the globe? George Whitridge and Max Friedrich, FinTech analysts at ARK, talks about how various countries have responded to the push for contactless payment methods, the economic benefits we’re seeing in contactless payments, and how companies and brands such as Zillow, Cash App, and DocuSign are responding to the current crisis. We also take a look at the response to the pandemic by The Small Business Administration and US banks, and why startups who live in uncertainty, are more likely to master this crisis than older business models. We ‘round off with some fascinating stats about just how dirty your credit and debit cards really are. If germs were a currency, perhaps we’d all still be in business? Tune in.

This week we are joined by Chip Paucek, 2U’s Co-Founder and CEO. 2U is one of the leading online education software platforms. At ARK we often say disruptive innovation gains traction in tumultuous times. There’s perhaps no better example than in the education space. For six years 2U noted that one of the biggest challenges was fighting the stigma of online education, and then in the midst of COVID-19 nearly every school has been forced into an online only setting. Tune in to hear Chip walk us through 2U’s critical role in helping schools’ transition from the classrooms to online. We talk about the challenges of 2U, how online learning can create more engaging classes, and how 2U’s scale can help lower the cost of higher education.

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As the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to strengthen its grip across the globe, it’s natural to feel a sense of dread and despair. However, we believe that tumultuous times can be the best catalysts for innovation, and this pandemic is no exception. In this episode, Simon Barnett and Ali Urman, ARK’s genomics analysts, are here to discuss developments in genomics and biotech, underway in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Simon sheds light on the declining cost curve of DNA sequencing, which allowed scientists to sequence the virus in a handful of days—a stark contrast to the six months it took to sequence the SARS virus. We also discuss improvements in diagnostic tools like synthetic biology in the context of this pandemic. Ali zooms further in on some preventative medicine and vaccine developments. While traditional vaccines use the virus itself, companies like Moderna, Inovio, and Arcturus Therapeutics, among others, are working on a range of unconventional and potentially groundbreaking preventative measures. We also look at how existing anti-viral drugs are being repurposed for the treatment of COVID-19.

Lastly, we take a look at auxiliary areas where we have seen an increase of innovations. Simon highlights how telemedicine, organ transplant, and blood safety measures have seen growth during the crisis. Many of the developments are breaking down FDA barriers. We hope that these developments galvanize innovative approaches to prevention, diagnoses, and treatments not only for COVID-19 but for other diseases as well. Be sure to tune in today!

Here at ARK we are always talking about disruption and now we are faced with huge disruption. The coronavirus outbreak has massive implications on many levels for the whole world, not least of which is the need for many people to work remote where possible. This episode is a discussion about what that looks like during a time of mass quarantine. We are focusing our discussion on the realms of communication and entertainment. First of all, we discuss video conferencing and naturally, our eyes are on Zoom. Having grown rapidly in the last few years, Zoom will probably prove to be even more important as social distancing is enforced. From there we turn to messaging and texting in a professional context, looking at Slack in particular. We consider some of the other concerns in this period of remote work, particularly security and how the cloud has helped businesses alleviate security concerns. The conversation then turns to entertainment, as we first look at professional sports events, almost all of which have been postponed or canceled, and what might take their place in people’s lives. We can already see E-sports growing, even before the outbreak. We finish off talking about television and movies, arguing that on-demand services will probably strengthen under current conditions with traditional cable suffering due to the absence of sports. Listen in to get it all!