TomTom's Profile

I often think of how wasteful it is that labs around the world all spend millions of the dollars on the same things in a race to be the first to publish. This open platform is a great example of how they should be sharing resources and working together, but I agree with several of the comments above that it will be hard to sustain. In the end, the goal is to make money off a drug, so people won’t always be open to sharing their ideas because they want the reward for themselves. This is also easily replicable by the pharma companies that could open similar platforms, and then be able to actually make a product from it much faster. I think it’ll be hard to maintain.. but they should definitely get credit for bringing open innovation into this space!

Such a cool application for AI!
As a bit of a health freak, I think it’s great that Pepsi is looking to evolve to address demand for healthier drinks, and this is such an interesting way of thinking about how to do that. I see two main ways that they can apply this: the first is they can look for drink trends and find nascent brands that embody them and acquire them. The second is that they can use the trending ingredients to come up with new original drinks, or to try and replace some of their existing ingredients with healthier alternatives. In both case, there is a chance that they would just be following the trends, but they have such power in the industry, that they would likely overtake some of the smaller niche brands even if their healthy drink was second to the market.

I had similar thoughts to some of the above comments. This strikes me as mainly a gifting opportunity, or as a flashy retail stunt. Unfortunately for Hershey, they are definitely not the go-to chocolate for a nice gift, so I think they would have to put in a lot of marketing effort to promote this premium experience. People frequently associate luxury chocolates with being hand-made, but I could imagine that watching this being done in store could at least be cool enough to get someone to go visit the store and buy once. I’m not sure it’ll be Hershey’s next big cash cow, though.
This did, however, get me thinking about how cool it will be once 3D printers become a household item and we can just download the Hershey, Godiva, Cote D’Or etc recipe and print it from our home.. yummy.

Cool findings, Jaclyn! I’m also a Lego fan, and it breaks my heart a bit to think of them doing poorly. It would also break my heart if they steered too much in the direction of digital, and away from their physical building blocks. Though I agree with you that VR might be a stretch for them, I wonder if you could keep the blocks, and kids could one day “navigate” through the physical structures they build using VR. Or perhaps whatever they built, could be uploaded and inserted into a computer game. I mostly hope that parents are indeed steering their kids away from screens and back to physical toys, which I believe are generally better for their physical and social development.
I did find it very cool that Lego let people way in on what they want to see in the future. Seems like the best way to make sure they give their customers what they want! At least the adults..

This is so cool! Such an innovative idea and for a good cause. Some of the previous comments have touched on this, but I was also wondering how this scales. Does the printer have to be on site? Or do they print pieces that they transport and then assemble? If so, it’s surprising (but awesome) that it is so significantly cheaper than traditional building.
I personally would not be overlay concerned with taking over construction jobs just yet. These projects are still relatively niche, and though they will hopefully grow with time, it will likely take a while before this becomes mainstream and we switch to this for large scale construction, so the industry workers will likely have a lot of time to get up to speed with the technology. There is also likely a steep initial investment needed to buy the machinery, so I imagine it will be tough for construction companies to afford, and 3D printing will, at least in the meantime, be reserved to these types of projects.

Great article! I actually wonder if dating apps already emphasize our biases as they are. When we swipe, given that we only have a picture, a city/school, and maybe a couple of words, I believe we are already making extremely biased decisions. We make assumptions based on just that very limited information, about how much we will be compatible with someone. Because of this, I’m not really convinced that the machine learning will make the dating apps any more biased than we already are, but rather that they will just mimic our existing biased behavior. If they focus their efforts on feeding us people similar to those that we have swiped right in the past, then it will in fact be more efficient and likely yield a higher matching rate, but in the end I think the percent of lasting relationships won’t change much. I actually think dating apps have a unique opportunity to reverse our biases, help bring people of different backgrounds together, and connect us with people that we might not have swiped right on based on just our past swiping behaviors, instead showing us people that they determine that we actually have things in common. I almost think of it like arranged marriages; though controversial, I can totally believe that our parents could actually know who would be a good match for us. In arranged marriages, the focus is on compatibility and values, which frankly are likely to be more important in a long-term relationship than mere physical attraction. With all the data that Match and Tinder have on us, they would likely be able to find us people that we are compatible with on an emotional level, perhaps better than we could ourselves, and that we may have missed when swiping only based on only looks. Maybe the concept of replicating arranged marriages isn’t the most romantic.. but how romantic is Tinder really anyways?