On 12 December, the IT album “Tech person of the year” will be on newsstands with Repubblica, La Stampa and Il Secolo XIX, in which we talk about the people, companies, gadgets and ideas that have marked a year of technology
The problem isn’t failure: it is don’t learn anything from the mistakes you make. Because sooner or later we all fall in life: the difference is how you get back up. Have you learned your lesson? If you’ve done it, you’ll be better at it when you try again. So what were the lessons we learned from technology in 2023? What are the failures? I have listed some of them.
Towards ITW23 By making mistakes we innovate by Eleonora Chioda 24 September 2023
The end of WeWork (and coworking): WeWork was one of the most celebrated startups of the past decade, it was worth almost 50 billion dollars. And he started bankruptcy proceedings. Companies fail because the world changes and what seemed like a winning idea becomes obsolete. In WeWork’s case, the idea was coworking, renting a desk in a nice place where you could meet other smart people who could grow your business. The shared office was more than a rented desk, it was a life philosophy that was very successful for a while. But following the pandemic, the very idea of the office has entered into crisis: for many jobs, smart working has become the rule.
The characters Tech gurus and lessons on failure: this is how Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Brian Chesky (Airbnb) were resurrected by Pier Luigi Pisa 23 September 2023
The crisis of Cruise (and robotaxis). Cruise was founded in a Californian garage in 2013 by a young AI and robotics genius, Kyle Vogt; and resold two years later for a billion to General Motors. The goal is to develop self-driving cars. Even Elon Musk said that in 2020 our streets would be invaded by robotaxis. It didn’t go like this: Cruise’s cars had a series of accidents, Vogt downplayed it by saying that this is how artificial intelligence is trained, he had to resign and General Motors froze its investments. We’ll talk about it again in a few years.
Analysis Are self-driving cars definitively dead? by Andrea Daniele Signorelli 17 November 2023
The decline of cryptocurrencies (and the zero of NFTs). The conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried (co-founder of FTX) and that of Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, co-founder of Binance, lead even those most in favor of innovation to ask themselves whether we still need cryptocurrencies. Beyond the financial crimes that emerged, the point is: they seemed destined to change finance by making it more democratic, accessible and transparent. It happened? Are they really useful to the world? 14 years after the first bitcoin transaction, it is time to take stock. A balance sheet has already been made for NFTs, non-fungible tokens, unique digital objects, authenticated with blockchain and exchanged in cryptocurrencies, which reached millionaire prices during the pandemic. Today 95 percent of NFTs in circulation are worth 0. Zero ethereum, zero dollars, zero euros. Always zero.
Scenarios Cryptocurrencies in 2023: the unknowns of a sector that has lost the trust of investors by Arcangelo Rociola 02 January 2023
The postponement of Metaverso (and virtual reality). When Mark Zuckerberg launched his virtual world with a spectacular presentation in October 2021 (changing the name of the Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp holding company to Meta), it seemed imminent: soon we would all move into a metaverse and do our lives with visors over their eyes. Within a few weeks, hundreds of metaverses were born; some bought virtual properties in these parallel worlds thinking that one day they would have enormous value; and thousands of “Metaverse experts” popped up on LinkedIn. Clearly it didn’t happen that way. Which doesn’t mean that the new viewers from Meta and Apple can’t have some useful applications, but mass diffusion seems distant. We still prefer to see each other in person.
Analysis But is the metaverse really already dead? by Andrea Daniele Signorelli 19 February 2023 Topics