What's Possible: 27th August, 2021

We hope you enjoy this week's hand-picked selection of important and interesting stories from the frontiers of tech.

How Europe’s top tech start-ups get it right

“European start-ups are being created and growing at an unprecedented pace these days, attracting the attention of global investors, customers, and corporate partners alike. In the process, they are proving the conventional wisdom wrong: launching a start-up amid the continent’s fragmented value pool doesn’t necessarily have to be such a challenging proposition.”

TikTok moves into e-commerce with Shopify partnership

“Shopify merchants will be able to add a new “Shopping” tab to their TikTok profiles and sync their product catalogs to create mini-storefronts on their profile.

Kylie Jenner is among the early adopters of the new service, and will use the feature with her Kylie Cosmetics brand, which will be available to shop directly on TikTok.”

How livestreaming is changing the way people shop

Deborah Weinswig, Coresight Research, joins Fast Money ‘The Next’ to discuss the future of e-commerce and the role live-streaming now plays in bringing products to consumer. With CNBC’s Leslie Picker, Melissa Repko and Ethan Choi, Accel partner.

Visa buys a CryptoPunk and publishes whitepaper on 'NFT commerce'

“Visa has published a whitepaper on NFTs to help businesses understand how they can integrate NFTs into their platforms and how Visa can help.

As Visa's core role, the company wants to help consumers purchase NFTs, and merchants accept NFTs as easily as they do for traditional goods and e-commerce, said Sheffield.

Visa is currently "actively engaging" with a number of its clients, helping them understand ways to participate in the NFT ecosystem, said Sheffield, declining to provide specific names.”

Moderna to start first human trials of mRNA HIV vaccine

"There's a pressing need for new ways to prevent infection from viruses like HIV and influenza that conventional vaccines have struggled to address and to treat rare genetic diseases and cancers that kill millions each year. Vaccines and therapies based on messenger RNA (mRNA) hold promise as a solution."

15% of the world’s population has a disability

“Bearing in mind they are 15% of the population and a near $2 trillion market, do we deal with people with different abilities effectively?

I’m not sure we do, but the World Economic Forum offers three practical proposals for doing things better.”

AI-Powered Tomato Pollinator Gives Bees a Break

“Israel-based startup Arugga, builds AI-powered robots that use computer vision to determine which flowers are ready for pollination and then blast air pulses at them to mimic the action of bumblebees and initiate pollination.

The performance of the bots is on par with the bumblebees and in some cases better by up to 5 percent, with the potential to perform other tasks and to collect and analyze data along the way.”

What if you could become invisible to mosquitoes?

“For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 to render humans effectively invisible in the eyes of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which use dark visual cues to hunt.”

Japan aims to bring back soil samples from Mars moon by 2029

“The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, plans to launch an explorer in 2024 to land on the Martian moon Phobos to collect 10 grams (0.35 ounce) of soil and bring it back to Earth in 2029.”

Why has the gig economy been a disappointment?

“Gig economy mania faded when it became apparent that the business model didn’t make sense for a lot of things — “Uber for X” just didn’t work for most values of X. And thus, an industry that was supposed to transform the face of the U.S. labor market ended up doing very little in terms of changing the way people work.”

‍