Author: azeeadmin

I worked at Google for six years. Internally, you have no choice — you must use Kubernetes if you are deploying microservices and containers (it’s actually not called Kubernetes inside of Google; it’s called Borg). But what was once solely an internal project at Google has since been open-sourced and has become one of the most talked about technologies in software development and operations.

For good reason. One person with a laptop can now accomplish what used to take a large team of engineers. At times, Kubernetes can feel like a superpower, but with all of the benefits of scalability and agility comes immense complexity. The truth is, very few software developers truly understand how Kubernetes works under the hood.

I like to use the analogy of a watch. From the user’s perspective, it’s very straightforward until it breaks. To actually fix a broken watch requires expertise most people simply do not have — and I promise you, Kubernetes is much more complex than your watch.

How are most teams solving this problem? The truth is, many of them aren’t. They often adopt Kubernetes as part of their digital transformation only to find out it’s much more complex than they expected. Then they have to hire more engineers and experts to manage it, which in a way defeats its purpose.

All of this means there is a great opportunity for DevOps startups to come in and address the different pain points within the Kubernetes ecosystem. This technology isn’t going anywhere, so any platform or tooling that helps make it more secure, simple to use and easy to troubleshoot will be well appreciated by the software development community.

In that sense, there’s never been a better time for VCs to invest in this ecosystem. It’s my belief that Kubernetes is becoming the new Linux: 96.4% of the top million web servers’ operating systems are Linux. Similarly, Kubernetes is trending to become the de facto operating system for modern, cloud-native applications. It is already the most popular open-source project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), with 91% of respondents using it — a steady increase from 78% in 2019 and 58% in 2018.

While the technology is proven and adoption is skyrocketing, there are still some fundamental challenges that will undoubtedly be solved by third-party solutions. Let’s go deeper and look at five reasons why we’ll see a surge of startups in this space.

Containers are the go-to method for building modern apps

Docker revolutionized how developers build and ship applications. Container technology has made it easier to move applications and workloads between clouds. It also provides as much resource isolation as a traditional hypervisor, but with considerable opportunities to improve agility, efficiency and speed.

Twitter temporarily suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday after the Georgia Republican posted a tweet that claimed vaccines don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19.

“These vaccines are failing & do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks,” Greene tweeted, contradicting the scientific community and calling for the FDA to refuse to approve vaccines. Greene’s tweet remains up on her Twitter feed, but it’s paired with a misinformation warning from the company that points users to information from the CDC.

Twitter told TechCrunch the tweet was “labeled in line with [Twitter’s] COVID-19 misleading information policy” and will result in Greene’s account being frozen in read-only mode for seven days in light of “repeated violations” of Twitter’s platform rules. Last month, Greene was suspended for 12 hours for falsely claiming that the virus posed little threat to healthy people under the age of 65.

The new suspension is Greene’s fourth slap on the wrist from Twitter under its current strike-based system for Covid-19-related misinformation. Greene is a repeat rule-breaker on the platform, which puts her account in jeopardy of a permanent ban if she offends a fifth time after her account is reinstated.

In spite of a widely available trio of vaccines proven to dramatically and effectively reduce the severity of Covid-19 infections or prevent them outright, Covid cases are on the rise in the U.S. in a major way. Florida continues to break its own record for daily infections, topping the numbers the state saw during the pre-vaccine months of 2020.

Online misinformation continues to play a major role in discouraging Americans from seeking the vaccine, even with the highly contagious delta variant on the rise. In states like Alabama, where vaccination rates are some of the lowest in the nation, those numbers have begun trending up as residents realize how vulnerable they are to the new variant, which is ravaging pockets of the population that haven’t yet sought the shot.

OpenAI has already made some big changes to Codex, the AI-powered coding assistant the company announced last month. The system now accepts commands in plain English and outputs live, working code, letting someone build a game or web app without so much as naming a variable. A few lucky coders (and, one assumes, non-coders) will be able to kick the tires on this new Codex API in a free private beta.

Codex is best thought of as OpenAI’s versatile language engine, GPT-3, but trained only on code instead of ordinary written material. That lets it do things like complete lines of code or entire sections, but when it was announced it wasn’t really something a non-coder would be able to easily interact with.

That’s changed with this new API, which interprets ordinary, everyday requests like “make the ball bounce off the sides of the screen” or “download that data using the public API and sort it by date” and puts out working code in one of a dozen languages.

I was treated to a live demo in which OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman (CTO) and Wojciech Zaremba (Codex lead) built a simple game from scratch and explained what was going on behind the curtain.

“Programming is about having a vision and dividing it into chunks, then actually making code for those pieces,” Brockman explained. The intention with Codex is to let coders spend more time on the first part than the second. After all, a huge amount of code is duplicating or outright copying what others have done before — it can be creative, of course, but no one is going to exercise their imagination in doing basic things like deploying a web server for testing a bit of code. Brockman did just that with a simple line — “create a web page that says that” or some such.

Image Credits: OpenAI

A second later there were a dozen lines of Javascript doing just that in a totally standard way.

“This is the worst part of programming,” said Brockman. “I’ve written this kind of code probably a couple dozen times, and I always forget exactly how it works. I don’t know these APIs, and I don’t have to. You can just do the same things easier, with less keystrokes or interactions.”

Because Codex is trained on basically all the public code on GitHub, among other repositories, it’s aware of all the standard practices, the 50 or 100 times someone includes a web server, keyboard controls, or object manipulations and animations in their code. And because the natural language side has all of GPT-3’s usual understanding, it gets when you say “make it smaller and crop it” and then “have its horizontal position controlled by the left and right arrow keys” you’re referring to the same “it.”

It also keeps its own work in mind, several kilobytes worth of coding context for itself — so it knows the naming conventions it must stick to, the existing bounds and requests, and other info that the user’s input would have implied.

It’s also aware of generalities embedded in the code corpus. For instance, when Brockman told it to “make the boulder fall from the sky,” the system didn’t ask what the “sky” is even though it hadn’t been defined on the largely blank canvas. Not only did it have the boulder fall from the top of the screen, but the falling speed accelerated like an object normally would — because its best guess at what “falling” and “sky” mean from other uses and context.

Image Credits: OpenAI

“We think it provides a new way to interact with existing software,” said Zaremba, who built a limited version of this for his PhD thesis years ago, while they demoed a Codex plug-in for Microsoft Word. Automation exists for many tasks in word processors, of course, but what if you get a weird formatting issue and you want to fix 100 different instances? Type “make all the text the same size and font, and make double spaces single” and it’ll do that, snipping out stray styles and picking the most likely size and font considered to be “normal.” Then type “make all the headings 24-point and bold” and it zooms through doing that, and so on.

It’s worth noting here that this sort of thing is convenient for many, but crucial to those who lack the ability to do these things due to things like disabilities. If you’re operating your word processor using voice commands or a joystick, being able to perform complex tasks like the above is extremely helpful. A blind coder, like anyone else, can patch together a standard public test server, but the process of skimming Stack Overflow, grabbing the best snippet, checking the syntax, changing the relevant variables and so on will almost certainly be a longer one.

And for those working within the confines of syntax and conventions handed down from on high, Codex can easily be made to reflect those by exposing the model to the documentation. Codex can also convert and port code from one language to another — much the same way a translation engine turns Spanish into French.

Brockman said that, as with GPT-3, they are only scratching the surface of what’s possible and are hoping to be surprised by what developers come up with (after all, OpenAI didn’t predict AI Dungeon). The beta will be private, like the one for GPT-3, but devs can apply and describe their project and the Codex team will review them for inclusion. Eventually the API will be a paid public one, but the timing and pricing are still to be determined on that.

FEMA will test its national emergency alert system later this week. Image: Getty Images

Did you hear it? FEMA just ran its first nationwide test of the U.S. emergency alert system since the pandemic.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, tested both the Emergency Alert System (EAS), which broadcasts an emergency tone and message on televisions and radios, and the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), a newer system that sends emergency notifications to smartphones. This was the second nationwide test of the WEA after its debut in 2018, and the first test for all U.S. cell phones who chose to opt-in to receive test alerts.

The test began around 2:20 p.m. ET. If you opted-in to the test, you likely got a message on your phone that said: “This is a test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” (The FCC explains how to opt-in to test alerts.)

For the first time, the WEA test sent the same test message in Spanish to phones that have Spanish set as the default language.

This is what the test WEA emergency alert looks like. Image Credits: WA Emergency Management (opens in a new window)

Since the last nationwide test in 2019, FEMA said it has improved WEA to send longer, detailed messages to the majority of phones that support it. The update also allows authorities to include tappable links, like web addresses.

FEMA runs these tests every year or two to ensure the system is working properly. It’s no small task: A national emergency alert system designed to broadcast the same message to potentially hundreds of millions of people at any given time is fraught with technological hurdles that require close co-operation from the cell carriers and broadcast networks.

The EAS system has been around since the late 1990s, but WEA was developed in more recently as more Americans rely on their phones. WEA alerts, like EAS alerts, are designed to be sent by local and state authorities for public safety alerts, missing children and imminent threats, such as severe weather. More recently, FEMA rolled out “presidential alerts,” which are supposed to be sent to every phone in the U.S. in the event of a national emergency. Presidential alerts, unlike other alerts, can be issued by the sitting president for any reason, and Americans cannot opt out.

WEA broadcasts emergency notifications through the cell towers of an affected area — such as an area about to be hit by a storm — rather than sending tens of millions of text messages, which would grind the cell networks to a halt. The alerts are created by local, state or federal authorities and are authenticated by FEMA through the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, and then passed to cell carriers to deliver the emergency alert.

The emergency alert system, though, is far from perfect. In 2018, an erroneous alert sent to Hawaii residents warned of an imminent ballistic missile threat,” and that “this is not a drill.” Minutes later, the alert was canceled. The false warning came as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea were at an all-time high, during which Pyongyang was regularly test-firing rockets used for its nuclear weapons program.

Security experts have also long warned that the EAS systems pose security risks. Last year, researchers found dozens of internet-connected, special-purpose servers , used by television and radio stations to interrupt their broadcasts to relay an emergency alert, which they said could allow a hacker to break in and compromise the servers.

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions is an important goal, but another challenge awaits: lowering the levels of CO2 and other substances already in the atmosphere. One promising approach turns the gas into an ordinary mineral through entirely natural processes; 44.01 hopes to perform this process at scale using vast deposits of precursor materials and a $5M seed round to get the ball rolling.

The process of mineralizing CO2 is well known among geologists and climate scientists. A naturally occurring stone called peridotite reacts with the gas and water to produce calcite, another common and harmless mineral. In fact this has occurred at enormous scales throughout history, as witnessed by large streaks of calcite piercing peridotite deposits.

Peridotite is normally found miles below sea level, but on the easternmost tip of the Arabian peninsula, specifically the northern coast of Oman, tectonic action has raised hundreds of square miles of the stuff to the surface.

Talal Hasan was working in Oman’s sovereign investment arm when he read bout the country’s coast having the largest “dead zone” in the world, a major contributor to which was CO2 emissions being absorbed by the sea and gathering there. Hasan, born into a family of environmentalists, looked into it and found that, amazingly, the problem and the solution were literally right next to each other: the country’s mountains of peridotite, which theoretically could hold billions of tons of CO2.

Around that time, in fact, the New York Times ran a photo essay about Oman’s potential miracle mineral, highlighting the research of Peter Kelemen and Jeurg Matter into its potential. As the Times’ Henry Fountain wrote at the time:

If this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change.

That’s broadly speaking the plan proposed by Hasan and, actually, both Kelemen and Matter, who make up the startup’s “scientific committee.” 44.01 (the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, if you were wondering) aims to accomplish mineralization economically and safely with a few novel ideas.

First is the basic process of accelerating the natural reaction of the materials. It normally occurs over years as CO2 and water vapor interact with the rock — no energy needs to be applied to make the change, since the reaction actually results in a lower energy state.

“We’re speeding it up by injecting a higher CO2 content than you would get in the atmosphere,” said Hasan. “We have to drill an engineered borehole that’s targeted for mineralization and injection.”

Image Credits: 44.01

The holes would maximize surface area, and highly carbonated water would be pumped in cyclically until the drilled peridotite is saturated. Importantly, there’s no catalyst or toxic additive, it’s just fizzy water, and if some were to leak or escape, it’s just a puff of CO2, like what you get when you open a bottle of soda.

Second is achieving this without negating the entire endeavor by having giant trucks and heavy machinery pumping out new CO2 as fast as they can pump in the old stuff. To that end Hasan said the company is working hard at the logistics side to create a biodiesel-based supply line (with Wakud) to truck in the raw material and power the machines at night, while solar would offset that fuel cost at night.

It sounds like a lot to build up, but Hasan points out that a lot of this is already done by the oil industry, which as you might guess is fairly ubiquitous in the region. “It’s similar to how they drill and explore, so there’s a lot of existing infrastructure for this,” he said, “but rather than pulling the hydrocarbon out, we’re pumping it back in.” Other mineralization efforts have broken ground on the concept, so to speak, such as a basalt-injection scheme up in Iceland, so it isn’t without precedent.

Third is sourcing the CO2 itself. The atmosphere is full of it, sure, but it’s not trivial to capture and compress enough to mineralize at industrial scales. So 44.01 is partnering with Climeworks and other carbon capture companies to provide an end point for their CO2 sequestration efforts.

Plenty of companies are working on direct capture of emissions, be they at the point of emission or elsewhere, but once they have a couple million tons of CO2, it’s not obvious what to do next. “We want to facilitate carbon capture companies, so we’re building the CO2 sinks here and operating a plug and play model. They come to our site, plug in, and using power on site, we can start taking it,” said Hasan.

How it would be paid for is a bit of an open question in the exact particulars, but what’s clear is a global corporate appetite for carbon offsetting. There’s a large voluntary market for carbon credits beyond the traditional and rather outdated carbon credits. 44.01 can sell large quantities of verified carbon removal, which is a step up from temporary sequestration or capture — though the financial instruments to do so are still being worked out. (DroneSeed is another company offering a service beyond offsets that hopes to take advantage of a new generation of emissions futures and other systems. It’s an evolving and highly complex overlapping area of international regulations, taxes, and corporate policy.)

For now, however, the goal is simply to prove that the system works as expected at the scales hoped for. The seed money is nowhere near what would be needed to build the operation necessary, just a step in that direction to get the permits, studies, and equipment necessary to properly perform demonstrations.

“We tried to get like minded investors on board, people genuinely doing this for climate change,” said Hasan. “It makes things a lot easier on us when we’re measured on impact rather than financials.” (No doubt all startups hope for such understanding backers.)

Apollo Projects, a early stage investment fund from Max and Sam Altman, led the round, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures participated. (Not listed in the press release but important to note, Hasan said, were small investments from families in Oman and environmental organizations in Europe.)

Oman may be the starting point, but Hasan hinted that another location would host the first commercial operations. While he declined to be specific, one glance at a map shows that the peridotite deposits spill over the northern border of Oman and into the eastern tip of the UAE, which no doubt is also interested in this budding industry and, of course, has more than enough money to finance it. We’ll know more once 44.01 completes its pilot work.

From vaccine distribution plans to fire trackers to bar crawls for your best friend’s birthday, maps help people visualize space and express impact. And Felt, a new Oakland-based startup co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk, is on a mission to make the medium more mainstream.

Felt is a collaborative software company that wants to make it easier for people to build maps on the internet. It announced today that it has raised $4.5 million led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Designer Fund, Allison Pickens, Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) John Lily (former CEO of Firefox), Julia and Kevin Hartz, and Keval Desai.

The millions will be used to help Felt grow its fully distributed six-person team to bring on more front-end, back-end and product engineers, as well as product and brand designers. Along with the financing, the company announced it is launching a private beta to better understand what early adopters it attracts, and how those users engage with the platform.

Felt allows users to build a map with data sets integrated into it. A user can open a map of California, for example, and then turn to Felt’s data library to add information about bits like wildfires and smoke patterns. The map’s power grows as more integrations are used to build out its background; using the prior anecdote, for example, the wildfire map integrated with census data could allow decision makers to see how many businesses could be impacted by incoming smoke.

Over time, Felt users will be able to see other user-generated maps and team projects on the interface — which they can then copy to add their own flair, or leave comments to support the community.

While consumers will eventually be able to access a free tier, the big test for Felt is if it can find a customer base that is willing to pay, and consistently use mapping software in meaningful ways. The company is in a unique spot. It’s not a GPS service, so it won’t serve the consumer who only turns to maps for directions. Instead, its build-a-map service is better suited for companies that already use it in their day-to-day.

Felt is meant to be a continuation of the collaborative software movement underscored by everyday tools like Google Docs and top companies like Notion and Figma, as well as a sequel to Hashemi’s previous company, Remix. Recently bought by Via for $100 million, Remix is a city transportation planning startup born out of Code for America Hackathon. As Hashemi spent nearly seven years building Remix, he was introduced to the inadequacies of map-making, namely that there are many use cases for maps but not many people who have the skill set to create a professional product. He hopes Felt will take mapping beyond city planning and into a variety of industries, from education to science to media.

“We really want to be much more aspirational in what we’re trying to accomplish and go much more broader [so it] results in a totally different kind of company,” Hashemi said. Perhaps its biggest competitor is ESRI’s GIS, a mapping software tool founded in 1969 and still used by hundreds of thousands of companies today.

Climate change could be a catalyst that brings more customers into the collaborative mapping space. Duruk, who built products at Uber and VGS, spoke about the importance of crisis response after last year’s wildfires and the resulting eerie orange sky in the Bay Area.

“Everyone in the Bay Area would wake up, go to the air quality map, weather map and the fire map,” Duruk said. “Everyone was trying to do something with maps, but only a few companies in the world had the resources to build something….it was broken.” Felt wants to go broad in its integrations, but did confirm that climate data will be a priority.

The challenge with building a powerful, creative tool is that there is a chance for people to misuse maps for abuse or targeting, Duruk said. Felt is thinking about ways to build in accountability and systematic processes to limit bad actors from using mapping information in the wrong way.

In the meantime, though, the early-stage startup is focusing on expression as a key way to understand its own product’s bounds. With millions more, Felt is aiming at increasing the capability of people by growing the map-ability of the world.

Kiwibot, the robotic sidewalk delivery startup, has announced a partnership with food services and facilities management giant Sodexo to bring its robots to U.S. college campuses. As of this month, students and faculty at New Mexico State University, Loyola Marymount University and Gonzaga University should have the option to order fresh meals via cute little robots from Sodexo-serviced locations on campuses.

This is not the first time Kiwibot is delivering food for over-caffeinated, hungover, exhausted college kids. Its robots, which are designed to look adorable and can move at around two miles per hour, were born at the University of Berkeley, California. There, the company was able to rack up 150,000 deliveries and prove its use case for expansion to other campuses, like the University of Denver and Stanford University. 

Sodexo provides the food for the cafeterias and dining halls of hundreds of colleges across the U.S., so this partnership could prove to be massively fruitful for Kiwibot. It’ll need the boost in order to keep up with its main competition, Starship Technologies, which completed one million delivery rides in January and operates in many college campuses, as well. 

Campuses are often a natural choice for startups in autonomous development. Not only are universities open to experimenting with new ideas, but given the unit economics on a campus, the revenue growth prospects are more favorable than working B2B in a city, says Diego Varela Prada, chief operating officer at Kiwibot. 

“Additionally, university campuses provide an advantage as they tend to be a more controlled environment than public streets in regards to things such as public infrastructure complexity and car traffic and congestion,” Prada told TechCrunch.

As part of the partnership, students will be able to use their meal plans for Kiwibot delivery through their Sodexo Bite+ app. Those without a meal plan can pay a la carte, including $2 flat fee plus 10% of the order amount. 

“We’re starting with 10 bots at Loyola, 10 bots at Gonzaga and 30 bots at New Mexico State, and that’s just the beginning,” said Prada. “We’re hoping to have many more. As a B2B business, we’re able to work very closely with our partner to increase the capacity of the bots as demand ramps up.”

Last year, many college campuses were forced to shut down amid the pandemic. Now, as school is about to be in session again, the U.S. is experiencing the highest caseload since February, averaging about 100,000 new cases everyday. There’s no telling what kinds of shutdowns or lockdowns we’ll see on college campuses this year, but Prada sees Kiwibot providing an avenue for students to order food safely.

“We have a procedure to disinfect the bots between orders,” he said. “If you’re a student and you don’t want to mix into large crowds, I think it’s much safer to order food through Kiwibot and have it delivered to the library or your dorm.”

Prada says Kiwibot’s robots, which are in their fourth generation, are advancing to Level 4 autonomy, but are currently at Level 3. The Society of Automotive Engineers describes both Levels 3 and 4 as a full self-driving system, but with Level 3, a human operator may be required to take over if there’s an issue, whereas a Level 4 system is expected to handle all driving on its own. 

“We have a feature that’s called corner-to-corner, and so what that does is it captures data around an indoor space and feeds that into an algorithm that basically makes decisions for the bot,” said Prada. “It handles the navigation for the robot in between high complexity situations, like cars, people, pets, little kids, people that work on campus. So we are not in a position yet to let the bot go on the campus on its own. Our remote operators have a feature where they switch to corner-to-corner and if the bot senses, for example, a street pass, then the remote operator or supervisor will take over.”

The engineers at Kiwibot are working on getting a bot to navigate indoor-to-outdoor and outdoor-to-indoor, so that it can pick up orders in a kitchen, go outside to deliver it and then navigate inside a building so that it can deliver an order to someone’s room or desk.

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its major sixth assessment report on the physical science of climate change. The details are grim, if getting more precise as better and more comprehensive data becomes available. As my colleague Mike Butcher summarized yesterday, it’s “stern and blunt in its conclusions.”

While many of the themes of the report will be familiar to any person not living under (an ever increasingly hot) rock, one part jumped out at me as I was perusing through the documents. The working group assessed that regardless of mitigation and adaptation strategies, many of the negative changes happening to Earth will continue unabated in all future scenarios. From the summary report:

Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level. […] Mountain and polar glaciers are committed to continue melting for decades or centuries (very high confidence). Loss of permafrost carbon following permafrost thaw is irreversible at centennial timescales (high confidence) …

In short, there is already momentum toward a warmer and more chaotic world, and we have limited tools to stop many of these trends.

There has been a rush of initiatives, investments, and startups bubbling around the theme of climate tech, with projects focused on everything from improving the yields and decreasing the emissions of agriculture and food production, to improving the power grid, and to reducing the emissions from air conditioning in buildings. Those initiatives are fine and important, but they don’t get at one of the toughest challenges facing us this century: that disasters are here, they are coming, and they are going to continue to get more intense as the century rolls on.

Just this past week, we have seen the second largest fire in California’s state history with the Dixie Fire, currently blazing across hundreds of thousands of acres in the northern reaches of the state. Meanwhile in Greece, hundreds of wildfires are causing an unprecedented crisis in that country. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons and more are intensifying and ravaging ever more billions of people across every continent.

One response to solving this problem is improving resilience — building up cities and structures as well as food and water systems that are fortified against these natural calamities. Many of those projects though are costly and also time-consuming, measured over the course of decades rather than months.

Instead, we need a more immediate push to develop better disaster response technology today. I’ve covered a wide segment of these companies over the past few months. There’s RapidSOS, which is adding more data into emergency calls to make responses faster and more efficient. There’s Qwake, which raised $5.5 million to build hardware and cloud services to allow firefighters to visualize their environments in smoky conditions. Meanwhile, YC-backed Gridware has also raised more than $5 million to create sensors to identify failures in the power grid faster.

In short, there are a growing crop of disaster tech startups — but more are going to be needed to fight the panoply of disasters that will strike in the years ahead.

There’s so much to do: better mental health resources for victims and first responders, easier access to recovery funds to heal lives, higher-quality sensors and data analyses to identify disasters earlier, faster logistics to evacuate people out of harm’s way. In fact, there are quite literally dozens of fields that need more investment and founder attention.

It’s not an easy market, as I pointed out in an analysis of sales cycles. Budgets are tight, disasters are random, and technology is often an afterthought. In some ways though, that friction is a font of creativity — how to build these next-generation of services and how to sell them is the risk that leads to the potential high return.

As the IPCC’s report made clear this week, the chaotic weather and intense disasters we’ve seen the past few decades aren’t going to abate any time soon. But with ingenuity, we can respond better to the disasters that are already on their way, and save lives and treasure in the process.