Tabla de contenidos para September / October 2021 en WIRED UK

“The NEOM Wellbeing Pod is a heatless oil-diffuser that releases a fine mist of scented vapour and fills a room in no time. It’s been life-changing during the pandemic. Using it in my home office is uplifting and makes working much more fun.” “MetaMask, a crypto wallet living in my browser as an extension, is one of the most powerful products I’ve used in years. It provides crypto users intuitive access to the most transformative innovation of our time, simplifying using decentralised crypto applications.” “Sandy Munro’s YouTube channel features reviews, teardowns and analysis of the most innovative new cars. Munro is a pioneer of the ‘lean design’ methodology and anyone who’s trying to build innovative highquality products can learn from him.”…

Healthcare wasn’t in Cyndi Williams’ original career plans. A chemical engineer by training and a one-time software engineer by trade, she’d worked on the business side of tech with Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, telecoms and finance. But in 2014, a conversation with a colleague and mentee at global software consultancy ThoughtWorks changed that. During one of their bi-weekly mentoring sessions, Isabella Degen revealed that she was one of the 400,000 people in the UK living with type 1 diabetes, a disease that required her to inject insulin multiple times a day, working from crude formulas and personal experience to determine doses and timings. She was leaving the company to create an app to make managing that easier. That year, Williams and Degan founded Quin. The app tracks users’…

At several points in human history, there have been great transitions that accelerated our progress and shaped everything that would follow. Ten thousand years ago, the first Agricultural Revolution allowed us to establish cities and civilization. Four hundred years ago, the Scientific Revolution gave us a reliable method for understanding the laws of nature. Two hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution launched us on a new trajectory of rapid economic growth. But there has recently been another transition that is more important than any that has come before it. With the detonation of the first deployed atomic bomb in 1945, a new age of humanity began. Our rising power finally reached the point where we could destroy ourselves – the first point at which the risks to humanity from within…

Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile is moving house – it’s not that he doesn’t like his current Miami pad, it’s more that he needs a place better suited to enjoying his art collection. “The new home is going to have 15 or 16 screens all around, and projectors,” Rodriguez-Fraile, a 33-year-old Spaniard with a background in finance, says. That is because his collection consists not of sculptures, paintings or etchings, but of non-fungible tokens – NFTs – unique cryptographic files that collectors regard as proofs of ownership for digital art pieces such as videos, gifs, or computer-designed images. Everyone can right-click and download the artwork an NFT is associated with; but it’s people like Rodriguez-Fraile, who buy the tokens in online auctions for swingeing cryptocurrency sums, that feel like the real owners. Which…

Fertility treatment is infamously tough to access. While one in seven UK couples faces infertility challenges, reportedly less than five per cent of these can access treatment. Funding cuts and rules on who can be treated mean just 35 per cent of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is NHS funded, and the field is dominated by expensive private clinics. For lesbian couples, who have to use fertility treatments to have children using donor sperm, the problem is even worse. One British startup wants to change that. Béa Fertility, co-founded by David O’Rourke and Tess Cosad, are launching what they call the first at-home fertility treatment after netting $1 million (£700,000) in pre-seed funding in April. The aim is to make fertility treatment accessible to those locked out of the system. Béa’s…

Dublin’s business-friendly tax regime, favourable economy and educated workforce have proved alluring to big names in tech including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Twitter and Amazon, all of which have their EMEA HQs in the city. Their presence helped the city rank within the top ten of the most recent European Digital City Index, with the authors noting that, thanks to so many tech giants based at Dublin’s Silicon Docks, local startups are afforded “unprecedented collaborative opportunities”. TechIreland chief executive John O’Dea says that, in spite of the pandemic, Irish tech funding exceeded €1bn for the first time in 2020, with a record 264 companies raising investment – and more than two-thirds of that pouring into Dublin-based businesses. Manna Manna founder Bobby Healy is no stranger to startups, having built and…

London’s startups have not only weathered a year that combined Brexit and a global pandemic, they attracted more investment than ever. According to Tech Nation’s annual report, UK startups hit a record $15 billion in VC funding in 2020, with London now fourth globally for tech VC funding, behind San Francisco, Beijing and New York. When the pandemic hit, there was panic, followed by a period of stability from the first lockdown through to the end of the year, says Gerard Grech, chief executive of Tech Nation. Entrepreneurial ecosystems and the government stepped up. “And clearly VCs invested,” he says. “But real investment has started to happen from this year on. We’re already seeing over half of what was invested last year in a quarter of the time.” Greyparrot Sixty…

The Dutch capital provides the perfect backdrop to innovation, with easy-to-navigate business laws, a favourable fiscal climate and advanced infrastructure, including a network of coworking spaces and incubators. “With over 180 nationalities, Amsterdam, next to New York, is probably the most international city for entrepreneurs I’ve ever seen,” says Oscar Kneppers, founder and CEO of Rockstart, one of the city’s leading accelerators. “And with a tiny home-market, people here by default think and act global when building a startup.” According to a recent Dealroom report, Amsterdam’s tech ecosystem now has a total value of €73 billion, up from €10 billion in 2015, making it the third-ranked in Europe. CodeSandbox With the world working from home, there’s never been a better time for CodeSandbox, founded by software developer Ives van Hoorne…

As sustainable battery maker Northvolt joins the list of major Stockholm success stories with its $3.9 billion valuation, and Candela’s all-electric C-7 speedboat takes on the US, the next cohort of Stockholm startups is navigating how to make an impact. You’ll find the Swedish version of Instacart (Vembla) and a European rival to Cameo (Memmo) alongside ambitious experiments in food, climate, health and business. “We benefit a lot from worldclass free education, with stellar engineering universities that are producing great talent,” says Joel Hellermark, CEO of AI education startup Sana Labs, “as well as the ratio of talent to companies, and an increasing number of executives who have gone through this journey at the likes of Klarna and Spotify.” Grace Health Period-tracking apps are nothing new to the startup space,…

A mysterious force known as dark energy pervades the Universe And we have no idea what exactly it is. Launching in the second half of 2022, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope will be sent into space with the aim of solving some of the secrets of dark energy, which is causing the expansion of our Universe to accelerate, resulting in galaxies moving away from each other at faster speeds. “There is no single compelling theory at the moment of what dark energy is,” says Catherine Heymans, professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland and a member of the Euclid consortium, a group of thousands of scientists that will pore over data collected by the telescope. Euclid will build on the work of…

Early in 2011, a couple of WIRED colleagues and I were discussing the incredible speed at which the startup scene in London was growing and the sheer number of innovative companies that were being founded. Something tangible was happening. Since its launch in 2009, WIRED had been actively covering the UK scene – but we wanted to help our readers understand what was happening elsewhere and report on the innovation, energy and investment in Europe. We dispatched reporters across the continent, from Stockholm to Moscow, Paris to Tel Aviv, in search of businesses that were getting entrepreneurs, investors and others interested in the ecosystem excited about their ambition and potential. Our first guide featured companies that are now household names, including Klarna (currently the continent’s most valuable startup with a…

The pandemic has decimated the live events industry, but Josh Katz believes there’s a silver lining – by turning off the revenue taps of industry giants such as LiveNation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster, Covid has created space for innovation. Katz is hoping to fill it with YellowHeart, a blockchain-based platform that gives event organisers of all sizes control over how their tickets are resold. The New York-based entrepreneur wants to erode a secondary ticket market that was pushing $15 billion a year before Covid-19 took hold. Traditional ticketing platforms are “socially irresponsible,” he says, “and that’s where we come into play.” Katz founded YellowHeart in 2017, but he’s been building the knowledge base beneath it for decades. An avid guitar collector, he began his career at Arista, a Sony subsidiary,…

Not long after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered x-rays, he granted his only interview about the matter to an American reporter. The reporter’s first question: “Is the invisible visible?” Kids around the world asked a version of that same question in 1998, when Nintendo released the “atomic purple” Game Boy Color. Behind its translucent lilac-tinted plastic shell, the console’s guts were all laid out to see – button actuators, conductive membranes, metal-dotted silicon, multicoloured wires. When the screen lit up with a little surfing Pikachu, you could observe all the unfathomables that were powering him. Gamers are “naturally intrigued by the technology and space inside their consoles,” says Taihei Oomori, art director of Sony’s product design group. When you reveal that space through plastic, he says, you “bring the distance between the…

One in two people will develop cancer in their lifetime, but the survival rate in the UK has doubled in the last 40 years, and 50 per cent of people with cancer survive for ten or more years according to research in England and Wales. That’s partly due to a greater understanding of the disease and how it develops and spreads through the body – which is the focus of a new exhibition from the Francis Crick Institute, the renowned biomedical research centre. It brings together eight specially commissioned short films as well as soundscapes, events and talks, and is broken into three parts: evolution, which explores how cancer starts and why certain people get it; disruption, which looks at how it spreads and hijacks the body; and resilience, which explores…

Last August, several dozen military drones and tank-like robots set off on an air and land drill 65 kilometres south of Seattle. The objective was to locate mock terrorists hiding among buildings. It was one of several exercises conducted last summer to test how artificial intelligence, with its ability to parse complex systems at lightning speed, could be deployed in combat zones. But the exercise served another, if not explicitly stated, purpose: to reflect the shift in the Pentagon’s “humans in the loop” thinking when it comes to operating autonomous weapons. US Military officials have begun to publicly push back against a reflexive discomfort with putting machines in charge of combat decisions. The policy remains that autonomous weapons must be designed “to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels…

When Covid-19 locked down most of the world in early 2020, resourceful tech entrepreneurs in Europe and beyond adapted – and thrived. New startups sprang up and existing companies pivoted, all while attracting record investment. Recent figures published by London & Partners show that VC activity has barely been dented by the pandemic. In 2020, investment in Europe totalled an unprecedented $43.1bn out of $272bn globally. For its part, London remained the leader for investment in Europe, attracting $10.5bn in funding. As we reflect on a decade of WIRED’s 100 Hottest Startups, these companies are a cohort like no other: they survived an unprecedented year, embodying what entrepreneurial spirit is all about. Our 2021 Hottest Startups aren’t necessarily the largest, best-known or most-funded. We aim to identify the startups that…

According to Atomico’s 2020 State of European Tech report, Berlin has seen $12.6 billion of investment since 2016, attracting $2.4 billion in 2020 alone (though it still slipped into third place, behind Paris). It also boasts one of the “densest networks of startups, the deepest pools of experienced talent and many of the most sophisticated investors,” says Pawel Chudzinski, a partner at Point Nine Capital. It’s the capital city of the biggest European economy, with a developed tech ecosystem celebrating bountiful IPOs and repeat founders, but remains affordable to live and work in compared to other cities. (It also has the best night-life, Chudzinski adds.) This year’s list demonstrates Berlin’s breadth of talent, with startups in sectors as diverse as fintech, food and gaming. Gorillas Love or loathe the dark…

Finland was one of a few European countries to see growth in the amount of capital pouring into tech startups in 2020, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, with both Helsinki and nearby Espoo reaping the rewards. The country’s ecosystem builds on past successes from the likes of gaming giants Rovio and Supercell, as well as more recent triumphs such as that of food delivery service Wolt. “Success creates success,” says Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen. He believes that Finland is “the best place in the world” to found a startup, thanks to its high quality of living – international talent is increasingly seeing its appeal. This year’s cohort spans a range of sectors, but many focus on sustainability. Flowrite Aaro Isosaari was working as CEO of…

When the now-retired lorry driver would ask GPs for help managing his diabetes and obesity, most – as Frost recalls – would “tell him off” for not eating more healthily. Often, they suggested his problems were permanent. “They told me I’d be on insulin for the rest of my life,” he says. Discouraged, he didn’t think he could improve his health, and for many years he didn’t try. His divorce didn’t help, nor did his always-on-the-road lifestyle. “For 30 years, I’d have 12-15-hour days, living on takeaways and sandwiches six days a week. At weekends, I’d just want to get drunk,” he says. But five years ago, Frost had an encounter that would change how he managed his health. When he moved to Sheffield and found Ollie Hart – a…

FERGUSON, A MIDDLE SCHOOLER IN ONTARIO, CANADA, HAD BEEN TAPPING OUT THE SAME FOUR-LETTER SEQUENCE ON HIS KEYBOARD FOR HOURS. W, A, S, D. W, A, S, D. He was steering his digital avatar, a LEGO-man-like military grunt, in laps around a futuristic airfield. Although his fingers ached, he would gladly have gone on for hours more. Every keystroke brought the 11-year-old closer to his goal: scaling the ranks of a group in the video game Roblox. The group had rules. Strict rules. Players dressed as pilots and marines went around barking out orders in little speech bubbles. The only three words Ferguson could say during training were “YES”, “NO” and “SIR”. And “SIR” generally applied to one person, Malcolm, the domineering adolescent who ruled the group. “His thing was…

Bolzano in Italy’s mountainous South Tyrol province might have distinctly hot summers and cold winters – at least by Italian standards – but it never truly experiences extreme weather conditions. However, at the city’s NOI Techpark, the mercury can shoot from as low as-40°C to as high as 60°C on consecutive days – and to order. These massive temperature fluctuations occur within the confines of terraXcube, an environmental simulation centre that can replicate an array of drastically different climatic conditions – from severe blizzards to torrential rain to parching desert heat – at the push of a button. The aim? To investigate the effects of extreme environments on whatever you place inside: humans, plants, machines and more. terraXcube is the brainchild of Hermann Brugger, the founder of the Institute for…

At the end of an afternoon surgery in 2014, anaesthesiologist Dr. Alistair MacDonald took the oxygen mask off a patient and noticed her skin was turning blue. Other members of the surgical team were getting ready for the next procedure and jamming out to music playing in the operating room, but the patient’s oxygen saturation was dropping dramatically. MacDonald doesn’t recall which song was playing, but he remembers it being extremely loud – so loud that he had to shout over it to get everyone’s attention. A nurse quickly stabilised the patient, and the music blared on. A thought occurred to MacDonald: why didn’t the music system know that the patient’s oxygen levels were degrading and turn itself off? “Why can’t the volume of the music be coupled to the…

Apparently, organising your makeup bag is very much like storing data when coding. Don’t believe us? Ask drag queen Anna Lytical, who recently declared it so in a TikTok video. (Eyeshadow palettes represent an array in which a group of elements can easily be identified, FYI.) “There is a limited number of equallysized spaces for product, and if I tell you I used the first one, you’ll know which one I’m talking about,” they say to the camera while sporting a lavender wig, eyeshadow and lipstick. “Who knew data structures could be so glamorous?” It’s just one of many videos shared that bridge two passions: computer science and drag. Anna Lytical – also known as Billy Jacobson – is a New York-based developer experience engineer for Google with a long-time…

Whitley Neill Blood Orange Gin From £26 whitleyneill.com This bright, citrussy gin boasts zingy aromas infused with Sicilian blood orange for the taste of Mediterranean sunshine in a glass. Pair with grapefruit juice for a gin spin on the classic Paloma cocktail. Jo Malone London Luxury Car Diffuser From £75 jomalone.co.uk True to its love of the unexpected, Jo Malone London is now offering to awaken your senses as you drive. From the zesty fragrance of Lime, Basil & Mandarin to the fresh crispness of Wood, Sage & Sea Salt, this car diffuser promises to be the perfect passenger. Beats Flex All Day Wireless Earphones From £49.99 apple.com Designed with magnetic earbuds and an auto-pause system, Beats Flex Earphones go wherever you go. Supporting accurate bass and ultra-low distortion, whether…

It has been a busy few years for Taika Waititi. Until 2017, the writer, director and actor was best known for making small, silly, but endearingly big-hearted films such as the 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, or 2016 coming-of-age comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople. But then came Thor: Ragnarok, the hugely successful Marvel film which reinvented Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder as a lovable goofball. It transformed Waititi’s career, and has since seen him linked to everything from his own Star Wars film to a live-action version of cult anime Akira. “People are like, ‘Oh you just popped out of nowhere’. Yeah, but I worked for ten years straight before Marvel gave me a call,” he says. “I was not just fucking around. I have evolved…

Startups love a bandwagon, from the flat illustration style of “Corporate Memphis”, to odd trends in company names. We’ve had the era of dropped vowels, the “ify”, “io” and “ly” years – and now the age of names that are just daft. So hot right now: random mouth sounds – fragrance subscription firm HOOHAA; e-commerce firm OOOOO; video chat mmhmm; not to mention the stubbornly un-Googleable consumer tech firm Nothing. “Anything goes,” says Nora Bradshaw, co-head of strategy at branding agency Superunion. Such names walk a line between being memorable, unspellable and unsearchable, but if the product is good enough, Bradshaw argues, it doesn’t matter. “I wouldn’t say a name can make or break a company,” she says. Equally, a name change won’t save an ailing one – just ask…

In March 2021, Feedzai, a company that uses AI to fight financial fraud, announced a Series D funding round of $200 million, raising its valuation above the billion-dollar threshold. It became Portugal’s fourth tech startup to achieve this milestone, placing the country above Spain and Italy in the unicorn ranking. “It’s a unique tech hub in Europe with geographical similarities to San Francisco, and the global ambition of Israel,” says Miguel Santo Amaro, CEO of Coverflex. Lisbon is a hub for foreign tech entrepreneurs due to the quality of its engineering talent, wide English language proficiency and entrepreneurial culture. “Here, we have to think international from day one,” says André Jordão, CEO of Barkyn. Barkyn “We’re not in the business of dog food. We’re reshaping and rethinking what pet care…

Blessed with a creative heritage and the Mediterranean lifestyle, the Catalan capital is home to some of Europe’s most forward-thinking young companies. The rocketshaped skyscraper Torre Glòries marks the entry to Barcelona’s tech district, looming over the city’s Poblenou neighbourhood. Once an industrial centre, its former factories are now home to hipsters, designers and some of the continent’s most innovative technology startups. “It has a very ten-years-ago Shoreditch feel – but with less rain,” explains Jon Norris of local coding bootcamp Codeworks. “Barcelona has traditionally been a creative hub. Add a great quality of life which attracts global talent, then mix that in with technologists, and interesting things are bound to happen.” X1 Wind Many of Barcelona’s companies are mission focused. Take energy firm X1 Wind: its floating buoy technology…

In 2020, Paris edged Berlin out of second place in the European VC stakes, attracting $3.4bn in investment. Paris’s rise is rooted in government strategy – the tech visa; the establishment of a public investment bank; changes in tax codes – as well as founders reinvesting in the ecosystem; a generation of highly-educated students from the grand ecoles choosing not to go into private industry but start their own business; and projects such as Station F, Europe’s biggest startup incubator. “When I was appointed, President Macron decided that France needed 25 unicorns by 2025 – we had three,” says Kat Borlongan, director of La French Tech, the governmentsupported agency that oversees national startup strategy. “We see it as a pipeline – and the goal is to build the biggest possible…

Year in and year out, Tel Aviv’s startup community has proven that it can achieve more than whole countries within its 52km2, thanks to investment in world-class research facilities, robust government support, and an ever-reliable influx of investment from within and abroad totalling $9.93 billion in 2020. In the first three months of 2021, nine Israeli startups reached unicorn status – more than any country in Europe – compared to 15 in all of 2020, and 12 in 2019. Tel Aviv has long been known as a place where founders have built innovative companies in verticals such as fintech and cybersecurity. But increasingly, entrepreneurs are growing startups in “deep tech” – technologies based on scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Empathy “Death and dying is the single largest consumer sector that is…

IN 2020 Amazon turned 26 years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping. With retail revenues in excess of $213bn (£150bn), it was larger than Germany’s Schwarz Group, America’s Costco and every British retailer. Only Walmart, with more than half-a-trillion dollars of sales, was bigger. But Amazon remained by far and away the world’s largest online retailer. Its online business was about eight times larger than Walmart’s. Amazon was also a lot more than just an online shop, however. Its huge businesses covering fast-growing areas such as cloud computing, logistics, media and hardware added a further $172bn in sales. At the heart of its success is a staggering research and development budget – $36 billion in 2019 – which is used to develop everything…