Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The race is on for the car of the future, equipped with self-driving capabilities, on-board personalised information and entertainment, and an ever-smaller carbon footprint. Today, however, comes news of a startup that’s improving car performance from the outside.

UVeye, a Tel Aviv-based company that has built a set of drive-through external scanners that can take images of the exterior of a vehicle (including the tires and undercarriage) and then — using computer vision and AI — instantly read those scans to detect for anomalies, has raised $31 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding its technology, as well as building out the rest of its business.

Today, UVeye is already finding applications in assessing the state of rental and used cars, helping with insurance adjustments, inspecting vehicles to diagnose mechanical or other problems, and as part of wider security efforts. Its customers include car giants, their OEM partners, insurance companies, security services and governments, rental companies, on-demand ride-hailing companies, and many others in the transportation industry whose businesses are based on maintaining or inspecting vehicles.

Amir Hever, the CEO and co-founder, noted that while there are, for example, six OEMs already working with his company, there is also a long waiting list of companies that want to work with the startup. So this is part of the reason for the funding, too: to scale up and meet that demand.

The key to UVeye is that its vertically-integrated system (which includes the scanning hardware as well as the software to read and understand the scans) is fully automated. “We give accurate reports of vehicle based on AI algorithms that are very accurate and will produce consistent results every time,” said Hever. “It’s harder to do this many inspections today because they are basically human based.”

Toyota Tsusho, Volvo Cars and previous investor W. R. Berkley Corporation are leading this round, along with another returning investor, F.I.T. Ventures, and others — strategic partners that underscore the company’s progress so far, and what trajectory it would like to follow.

UVeye said that Toyota Tsusho (a member of the Toyota Group that provides a number of car-related services such as exporting, alongside non-automotive interests) will be using its technology in used car centers and the wider automotive trading market. Volvo will be rolling UVeye out in its factories, dealerships and for aftermarket support — or “whole lifecycle” management, in the words of Hever. And W. R. Berkeley, an insurance company, has been working on business models incorporating the use of UVeye’s scanning technology to help with registrations and subsequent claims, as well as those security applications.

This funding is the first significant money that the startup has raised and brings the total raised by UVeye to about $35 million, with previous investors including two more strategic partners, Daimler and Skoda. (Impressive to note the traction so far, in fact, on so little capital.)

“Premium quality standards are at the core of the Volvo brand and we are intrigued by the possibilities that UVeye’s technology offers,” Zaki Fasihuddin, CEO of the Volvo Cars Tech Fund said in a statement. “This type of advanced scanning technology could allow us to take the next step in quality.”

“When we made our initial investment in UVeye two years ago, we believed its system could have game-changing impact within security and inspection applications globally,” said Mike Nannizzi, director of fintech investments at W. R. Berkley Corporation, in a statement. “Today’s announcement validates that early hypothesis.  We congratulate UVeye, Toyota Tsusho and Volvo Cars for building a cohesive partnership with enormous potential.”

UVeye’s technology is aiming to replace — or at least augment — a very antiquated and analog way of inspecting cars from the outside. Typically and traditionally, inspections are done by human mechanics, who then compare their findings against previous human-made assessments to identify issues. The vehicle also needs to be completely stationary during these checks. The whole process can take hours or days.

UVeye brings that down to seconds, Hever said. Currently a car can be moving up to 20 miles per hour and still be “read” as well as a car that is stationary, with the size of cosmetic anomalies — scratches and the like — capable of being as small as 2 millimeters in size. The system continues to get optimized all the time, Hever added.

Today the company continues to focus on vertical integration — that is, UVeye manufactures all its own hardware as well as develops the software that runs on it. I asked if at any point it might be able to work with the kind of camera you might typically find on a smartphone. These are improving all the time, and they are already being used as portable computers by, for example, customer service assistants at rental agencies to check-in vehicles after they have been returned by customers.

Hever said that while this may be the case, the aim for his company is to fully automate the inspection to the point that no human would need to be involved at all in that aspect.

“The market has really improved and cameras are chaning all the time,” said Hever, “But what is unique about our solution is that we are trying to make them automated.”

So, for example, scanning points could be set up at the car rental entrance / exit point to automatically take in the car details before and after it’s been used — or equally on an assembly line of a car maker or at an inspection station for an insurance company, eliminating the need for manual operators. (This obviously presents a higher IT cost to the customer, of course, although it might be justified by reducing the number of customer service agents that need to be on the payroll, and more importantly speed up the procurement and return of cars.)

Longer term, the plan will be to continue expanding UVeye’s capabilities and applications, as well as business partners. The possibilities for what it might tackle next are very interesting:

Tapping into the rise of autonomous vehicle technologies, one area that UVeye is starting to explore is how its exterior system might better communicate with the kinds of diagnostics that a car’s own internal systems are producing, to provide even more accurate assessments of problems a car might be having. (For example, in the case of engine problems and leaks, or small cracks in some of the parts, or problems with tires.)

And UVeye’s platform could potentially include expand to scanning what might be on the inside as well as the outside. Today, a lot of this is done with x-rays but there are new technologies involving sound waves and other parameters to be able to identify and verify cargo shipments — which could take the company into other verticals around shipping and logistics, as well as become even more relevant to security inspections.

Iflix, the streaming video service that competes with Netflix in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets, announced today that it has raised a new round of funding led by Fidelity International, with participation from returning investors Catcha Group, Hearst, Sky and EMC. The Malaysia-based company did not disclose the amount of the round, but said it totals more than $50 million and will be used for growth ahead of a potential public offering.

Iflix also added new media companies as investors, including MNC, Yoshimoto Kogyo and JTBC, from Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, respectively. The company currently claims 17 million active users, up from 9 million six months ago. In a press release, co-founder and chairman Patrick Grove said “These investments are a clear affirmation of IFlix’s business model and growth prospects, and strengthens our ties to some of the region’s largest providers of local content.”

The company announced seven months ago that it had sold off its remaining shares in its Africa business, called Kwesé Iflix, to focus on its markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The latest round brings its total funding raised so far to more than $350 million, according to Crunchbase.

Trading on China’s new Nasdaq-style stock market began today, with 25 tech companies listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, operated by the Shanghai Stock Market. Called the STAR Market, the board is an initiative by the government to encourage more Chinese tech companies to list domestically by addressing concerns about governance.

Traders cautioned that initial trading may be volatile as investors buy and trade stocks, however, and that warning was borne out today with trading by several companies paused after a surge of buying triggered their circuit breakers, or measures put into place that temporarily halt buying and selling to prevent stock crashes.

Plans for the STAR Market were announced in November as part of the Chinese government’s efforts to launch capital market reforms and make listing in mainland China more appealing to tech companies by easing profitability requirements. Some of the highest-profile Chinese tech IPOs, including Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, JD.com and Pinduoduo, have taken place in New York City or Hong Kong, and the STAR Market may encourage more local stock debuts and investment—a goal that holds especially high stakes as China’s trade war with the U.S. continues.

But CNBC notes that the success of the STAR Market is far from a sure thing, since China has launched two other equity markets (the ChiNext in 009 and the New Third Board in 2013) that still receive far less attention than its two primary stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

For western startups looking to enter Asia and Asian startups expanding globally, more funding has become available as investors are increasingly looking to export local tech solutions to overseas markets.

Globally based venture capital firm White Star Capital has set up a new office in Hong Kong this month to capture entrepreneurs in the budding region as well as help its portfolio companies go to Asia. Founded by Eric Martineau-Fortin, who spent years conducting mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, and Jean-Francois Marcoux, who sold his gaming startup Ludia to FermantleMedia, White Star has over the last decade backed a spectrum of early-stage companies across several continents.

Currently investing with eight partners spread across seven cities, White Star’s portfolio spans from New York-based healthy meal startup Freshly, rewards app Drop out of Toronto, on-demand photo platform Meero from Paris and dog food startup Butternut Box in London.

Beginning in 2017, Martineau-Fortin and his partners began looking eastward. They decided to initially exclude China as the market was already crowded with no shortage of funding available, leading to much larger investment round sizes compared to the U.S. and Europe as well as notoriously high valuations.

The investor also believed “cultural differences in both consumer and enterprise behavior” require different regional strategies. Whilst certain Asian companies specializing in artificial intelligence, fintech, enterprise software and micro-mobility share some commonalities with Western counterparts, others such as e-commerce businesses remain, still, quite distinct in Asia.

“Having said this, there is also a number of fabulously interesting ecosystems and countries outside of Hong Kong and China that are sometimes forgotten by North American and European-based investors, such as Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taipei. Those are also very advanced regions with great schools, great engineers having certainly easy access to capital but not always the ability to connect and sell their product, services and technologies to other places than the U.S. West Coast,” said Martineau-Fortin in a phone interview with TechCrunch.

Upon that realization, White Star started to build connections with big corporations and investors in Japan and South Korea, which in 2018 led to opening its first Asian location in Tokyo headed by former World Economic Forum executive Shun Nagao.

The proven record in Japan eventually inspired the investment firm to launch in Hong Kong, adding to a list of offices in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm. Joe Wei, a former investment banker at Deutsche Bank for more than 10 years before becoming a fintech entrepreneur, is taking the lead for White Star in Hong Kong.

The firm’s strategy is to allocate 10-15% of each fund outside of North America and Europe with the bulk of it reserved for Asia-based startups. It’s currently 75-80% through its $180 million second fund closed in 2018, and it’s looking to raise a bigger fund leading up to 2020.

Why Hong Kong

The founding partner believes Hong Kong offers great exposure to mainland China with easy access to fast-growing places as Shenzhen — which houses some of the world’s biggest tech firms such as Tencent, Huawei and DJI — while “offering a similar business environment” to the one it has experienced in New York and London.

“Not only do you have a lot of capital in Hong Kong, but you have also a bunch of new innovative ideas that are coming out of Shenzhen and other fast-growing cities in China and Southeast Asia. We think a number of these ideas could certainly be of interest for North America and Europe,” noted Martineau-Fortin.

Irrespective of where companies are based, White Star always selects them based on a set of criteria, which are: “Can we help our companies expand outside their own base? Can we offer them [help to] recruit talent from abroad? Can we offer our venture connection with certain companies that can be relevant to either the tech, distribution or manufacturing side?”

Trade tensions between the U.S. and China are not to be overlooked for anyone investing in the Greater China region. Martineau-Fortin pointed out while the trade war is negative for everyone, the impact on White Star is likely limited as its investment platform offer “unique neutrality to these challenges.”

“Perhaps the trade conflicts will have an impact on the relationship certain of our U.S. companies have with other jurisdictions, but I certainly hope it could be the opportunity for other of our portfolio companies in Europe and Canada to strengthen the strong bond which exists between Asia and China, and these regions where we have a strong presence”.

Elon Musk planning to change up the Hyperloop student engineering competition that his company SpaceX has run for the past four years. Next year’s competition will be done in a tunnel that’s over six miles long, the SpaceX CEO said on Twitter on Sunday, with a curve instead of being in a straight line like the current, 3/4-mile test tunnel at SpaceX’s Hawthorne HQ.

That’s a big change, and one that it’s unclear how and where SpaceX will make it happen, given that the current test tunnel can support likely an additional “200 meters” according to Boring Company President Steve Davis speaking at this year’s Hyperloop Pod Competition finals earlier on Sunday.

Davis and Musk discussed extending the tunnel on stage, but it sounded like they were planning a relatively minor extension next year, with Musk musing that they’d likely be able to build a longer, Boring company-dug tunnel about three years from now for use in the annual student challenge.

“I don’t think we’ll have a long enough, straight enough underground tunnel a year from now but I think three years from now we definitely will,” Musk said during a Q&A at the competition. “So figure three years from now, we’ll at least have a couple miles […] now then you can really move.”

Musk also entertained the possibility of starting a new engineering competition around The Boring Co’s main mission: Tunnelling.

“We could maybe do a tunnelling competition, that might be good,” Musk said. “We’ll consider a tunnelling competition,” he concluded after a few seconds of thought.

“I think a tunnelling thing would be pretty exciting,” Musk said later in response to a follow-up question by one of the student team members on site. “Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively – it’s harder than it seems.”

Current digging technology can only manage a near-glacial pace, and Musk said that if we could get up to about one-tenth the speed of walking, or around a mile every three minutes, it would be a huge change in the feasibility of building a 3D network of underground transportation.

Based on his tweet later on Sunday evening, Musk has come up with a way to greatly increase the distance of the test tunnel, but based on his earlier comments about when we can expect to see a subterranean tunnel dug far and straight enough, it seems unlikely that the answer will be an underground tunnel just yet.

SpaceX hosted its fourth annual SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition finals on Sunday at the test tube it built outside its Hawthorne HQ. We were on site for the competition, and watched as Team TUM, from the Technical University of Munich, took home the win thanks to achieving the top speed overall of any team to run in the finals.

TUM (formerly known as team WARR Hyperloop in past competitions) is a repeat winner, and achieved a top speed of 288 mph in this year’s finals. That’s the fastest overall for a Hyperloop pod thus far – it beat its own record from last year of 284 mph set during the third SpaceX student run-off. It wasn’t without incident, however – near the end of its run, there was a spark and some debris appeared to fly off the craft, but it still survived the run mostly intact and satisfied SpaceX judges to qualify for the win.

TUM beat out three other finalist competitors, including Delft Hyperloop, EPFL Hyperloop, and Swissloop. Delft unfortunately had a communication error that cut their run short at just around 650 feet into the just over 3/4 mile SpaceX Hyperloop test track. EPFL managed a top speed of 148 mph and Swissloop topped out at 160 mph.

SpaceX Hyperloop Pod test track at its Hawthorne HQ. This is the end where student teams load in their test pod during the annual competition.

For the teams that did get to run on Sunday, the process involved loading their pod, which are roughly the size of bobsleds but little more than engines on wheels, onto the single track which runs the length of the interior of the Hyperloop test tube. The tube is then sealed and de-pressurized to near vacuum, which is essentially how Musk’s original Hyperloop concept envisioned the super-speed transportation method would work.

All the teams gave a good showing, and the total number of student teams was actually 21, with over 700 individual sin total taking part in the competition from a variety of schools including Cal Poly, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Indian Institute of Technology and my own alma mater the University of Windsor (who worked with St. Clair College on their pod).

Teams had to prove to their SpaceX and Boring Company staff advisors that they were ready to run in the tube in order to qualify for the finals, and spent two weeks prior to the finals on Sunday trying to do just that. Of those 21 teams, only the four finalists managed to get the green light to run in the final competition, based on advisor criteria that includes safety and survivability of their pod design. There’s a kind of ‘good luck’ mantra at the competition of saying ‘Break a pod’ prior to a run, but SpaceX engineers don’t actually want team pods to experience catastrophic failure inside the tube while on a run. This year, the competition was even more challenging because all pods have to use their own communication systems for the first time, and the pods must be designed to propel themselves to within 100 feet of the far end of the tube before they stop.

21 teams in total competed in this year’s competition, and they all brought their pods to display on race day, even though only four finalists actually ran their pods through the test track.

Most of the teams I spoke to who failed to qualify were dismayed but also resolute on coming back and qualifying next year. Some did express a bit of frustration about the gap between some of the teams from smaller schools, and those in the final four (who do qualify repeatedly year after year). Many of the finalists have deep-pocketed corporate backers, including Airbus, while some of the smaller schools have next to no funding – resulting in a cost delta of hundreds of thousands of dollars when it comes to the total bill for the test pods built.

That said, all the teams are clearly thrilled to be able to participate, and see the competition as a chance to essentially get scored to work at one of Musk’s many high tech ventures, including SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company. For those companies, too, it seems like a no-brainer to attempt to recruit from the engineering ranks of these best-in-class technical undergrad and graduate students.

EPFL Hyperloop didn’t win the competition – but they have reason to celebrate, since at least some graduates will probably ‘win’ jobs at Musk’s various companies.

“I think the competition is fun, and inspiring and also useful technology comes out of it,” Musk said regarding the purpose of the event, before answering a final question from Boring Company President Steve Davis about whether or not there will be another competition next year – “Oh yeah of course,” Musk replied, to much applause from the crowd of competitors.

From Toronto to Tokyo, the challenges faced by cities today are often remarkably similar: climate change, rising housing costs, traffic, economic polarization, unemployment. To tackle these problems, new technology companies and industries have been sprouting and scaling up with innovative digital solutions like ride sharing and home sharing. Without a doubt, the city of the future must be digital. It must be smart. It must work for everyone.

This is a trend civic leaders everywhere need to embrace wholeheartedly. But building a truly operational smart city is going to take a village, and then some. It won’t happen overnight, but progress is already under way.

As tech broadens its urban footprint, there will be more and more potential for conflict between innovation and citizen priorities like privacy and inclusive growth. Last month, we were reminded of that in Toronto, where planning authorities from three levels of government released a 1,500-page plan by Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs meant to pave the way for a futuristic waterfront development. Months in the making, the plan met with considerably less than universal acclaim.

But whether it’s with Sidewalk or other tech partners, the imperative to resolve these conflicts becomes even stronger for cities like Toronto. If they’re playing this game to win, civic leaders need to minimize the damage and maximize the benefits for the people they represent. They need to develop co-ordinated innovation plans that prioritize transparency, public engagement, data privacy and collaboration.

Transparency

The Sidewalk Labs plan is full of tech-forward proposals for new transit, green buildings and affordable housing, optimized by sensors, algorithms and mountains of data. But even the best intentions of a business or a city can be misconstrued when leaders fail to be transparent about their plans. Openness and engagement are critical for building legitimacy and social license.

Sidewalk says it consulted 21,000 Toronto citizens while developing its proposal. But some critics have already complained that the big decisions were made behind closed doors, with too many public platitudes and not enough debate about issues raised by citizens, city staff and the region’s already thriving innovation ecosystem.

In defense of Sidewalk Labs and Alphabet, their roots are in Internet services. They are relative newcomers to the give and take of community consultation. But they are definitely now hearing how citizens would prefer to be engaged and consulted.

As for the public planners, they have a number of excellent examples to draw from. In Barcelona, for example, the city government opened up its data sets to citizens to encourage shared use among private, public and academic sectors. And in Pittsburgh, which has become a hub for the testing of autonomous vehicles, the city provided open forum opportunities for the public to raise questions, concerns and issues directly with civic decision-makers.

Other forward-looking cities, such as San Francisco, Singapore, Helsinki and Glasgow, are already using digital technology and smart sensors to build futuristic urban services that can serve as real-world case studies for Toronto and others. However, to achieve true success, city officials need to earn residents’ trust and confidence that they are following and adapting best practices.

Toronto skyline courtesy of Shutterstock/Niloo

Data privacy

Access to shared data is crucial to informing and improving tech-enabled urban innovation. But it could also fuel a technologically driven move toward surveillance capitalism or a surveillance state – profiteering or big brother instead of trust and security.

The Sidewalk proposal respects the principles of responsible use of data and artificial intelligence. It outlines principles for guiding the smart-city project’s ethical handling of citizen data and secure use of emerging technologies like facial recognition. But these principles aren’t yet accompanied by clear, enforceable standards.

Members of the MaRS Discovery District recently co-authored an open-source report with fellow design and data governance experts, outlining how privacy conflicts could be addressed by an ethical digital trust. A digital trust ought to be transparently governed by independent, representative third-party trustees. Its trustees should be mandated to make data-use decisions in the public interest: how data could be gathered, how anonymity could be ensured, how requests for use should be dealt with.

They come with big questions to be resolved. But if a digital trust were developed for the Sidewalk project, it could be adapted and reused in other cities around the world, as civic leaders everywhere grapple with innovation plans of their own.

Image courtesy of Getty Images/Colin Anderson

Collaboration

The private sector creates jobs and economic growth. Academia and education offers ideas, research and a sustainable flow of tech-savvy workers. The public sector provide policy guidance and accountability. Non-profits mobilize public awareness and surplus capital.

As Toronto is learning, it isn’t always easy to get buy-in, because every player in every sector has its own priorities. But civic leaders should be trying to pull all these innovation levers to overcome urban challenges, because when the mission is right, collaboration creates more than the sum of its parts.

One civic example we like to point to is New York, where the development of the High Line park and the rezoning of the West Chelsea Special District created a “halo effect.” A $260-million investment increased property values, boosted city tax revenues by $900-million and brought four million tourists per year to a formerly underused neighborhood.

A mission-oriented innovation ecosystem connects the dots between entrepreneurs and customers, academia and corporates, capital and talent, policymakers and activists, physical and digital infrastructure – and systems financing models can help us predict and more equitably distribute the returns. Organizations like Civic Capital Lab (disclaimer: a MaRS partner) work to repurpose projects like the High Line into real-life frameworks for other cities and communities.

That kind of planning works because the challenges cities face are so similar. When civic leaders are properly prepared to make the best of modern tech-driven innovation, there’s no problem they can’t overcome.

When tech companies sue cities, it’s rare to see a resolution — albeit a temporary one — in favor of the tech company happen so quickly, if at all. Lyft sued San Francisco in early June, claiming the city was in violation of a 10-year contract that would give Lyft exclusive rights to operate bike-share programs.

Now, the city has granted Lyft an interim permit to deploy its dockless e-bikes, and is holding off on granting to permits to other operators. Lyft officially deployed its bikes on Friday.

“We’re thrilled to share our new ebikes with riders in San Francisco,” Lyft Head of Micromobility Policy Caroline Samponaro said in a statement. “We’ll be rolling out bikes starting today and appreciate our riders’ patience as we waited for the green light from SFMTA.”

In its lawsuit, Lyft sought a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order to prevent the city from issuing permits to operators for stationless bike-share rentals. While the court denied Lyft’s request for a TRO, it did approve a preliminary injunction to temporarily stop the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency from issuing dockless permits to operators other than Lyft, without at least giving Lyft the first opportunity to submit a proposal.

The whole process, called “Right of First Offer,” may take months, according to the SFMTA. That’s why it decided to offer Lyft an interim permit to operate up to 1,900 of its dockless, hybrid e-bikes in addition to its classic bikes offered through its station-based service, once known as Ford GoBike.

“These new bikes will allow Lyft to address the severe bicycle availability issues that Bay Wheels has faced since Lyft removed e-bikes from service in April,” the SFMTA wrote in a blog post. “Essentially, the interim permit allows the existing system to return to functionality even as we negotiate with Lyft for a potential future expansion.”

The lawsuit was in light of SF announcing it would take applications for operators seeking permits to deploy additional stationless bikes. San Francisco, however, said the contract does not apply to dockless bike-share, but only station-based bike-share. Well, a judge sided with Lyft, saying the agreement did “not draw a distinction between docked/stationed and stationless/dockless bikes…Plaintiff therefore is entitled to unconditional exclusivity for stationed or stationless ‘traditional’ bikes during the term of the agreement.”

While the process continues in court, the SFMTA has also extended JUMP’s permit for up to 500 stationless bikes in order to ensure more reliable services.

I’ve reached out to Uber/JUMP and will update this story if I hear back.

When a digital health company announces a new app, everyone seems to think it’s going to improve health. Not me.

Where I work, in San Francisco’s public health system, in a hospital named after the founder of Facebook, digital solutions promising to improve health feel far away.

The patients and providers in our public delivery system are deeply familiar with the real-world barriers to leveraging technology to improve health. Our patients are low-income (nearly all of them receive public insurance) and diverse (more than 140 languages are spoken). Many of them manage multiple chronic conditions. The providers that care for them struggle with fragmented health records and outdated methods of communication, like faxes and pagers.

So when companies tell us they will cure diseases, drive down costs, and save lives with state-of-the-art technology, I am often hesitant. 

More than thirty billion dollars have been invested in digital health since 2011. The resulting technological innovations, such as mobile applications, telemedicine, and wearables, promise to help patients fight diabetes, treat chronic disease, or lose weight, for example.

However, we have yet to see digital health drive meaningful improvements in health outcomes and reductions in health expenditures. This lack of impact is because digital health companies build products that often don’t reach beyond the “worried well” – primarily healthy people who make up a small proportion of health expenditures and are already engaged in the healthcare system.

If we’re designing health apps for those who already have access to healthcare, nutritious food, clean air to breathe, and stable housing, we’re missing the point.

It’s no surprise that health apps are incongruous with the needs of low-income, diverse, and vulnerable patients when these populations are unlikely to be a part of user testing. In addition, the science that technology developers draw from is generated by clinical trials conducted on participants who often do not reflect the diversity of the United States.

Over 80% of clinical trial participants are white, and many are young and male. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, as well as older adults must be included in clinical trials to ensure the results — drawn on not only for product development but also for clinical care and policy — are relevant for diverse populations. 

Research conducted by my colleagues at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations demonstrates that patients who are low-income are unable to access many digital health apps. One of our patients testing a popular depression-management app said, “I’d get really impatient with this” and expressed concern that “Somebody that’s not too educated would be like, ‘now, what do I do here?’” A caregiver testing a different app also voiced frustration, saying “Yeah, it’s an app that makes you feel like an idiot.” Yet, despite these barriers, the majority of our study participants (most of whom have smart phones) also express a high interest in using technology to manage their health.

 While the private sector is great for innovation, it will fail to improve health in a meaningful way without real-world evidence generated in partnership with diverse patients. In addition, these for-profit companies face long odds to benefit their shareholders in a substantial way without learning how to reach the 75 million patients on Medicaid (including 1 in 3 Californians) who stand to benefit from digital health solutions.

 There’s an answer, though, and it’s within reach. To truly improve health outcomes, digital health companies must partner with public health experts and patients to not only ground themselves in evidence-based research, but also build products that meet the needs of all patients. 

Along with the compelling business potential of innovating for Medicaid, infrastructure to support this work is growing. For example, organizations like HealthTech4Medicaid are bending the arc of innovation towards the patients who need it most through advocacy and key partnerships with payers, policy makers, care providers, and technology developers.

To truly revolutionize health, let’s demand that technology creators and scalers include diverse end users early and often. Otherwise, the app “for that” will be for them, not for all of us.

In the house in which I grew up, a single framed newspaper front page loomed over us. “MAN ON MOON“, it declared jubilantly, in an enormous, suitably momentous typeface. Subheadings included “‘It’s very pretty up here … a fine, soft surface’” and, of course, “A giant leap for mankind.”

One leap forward, three steps back. That newspaper was dated fifty years ago today, as I type this. Apollo 17 — “the most recent time humans have travelled beyond low Earth orbit” — took place in December 1972, a date at which a large majority of humanity today was not yet born.

Space travel is not the stuff of science fiction. It is the stuff of history books, of yesteryear, of scratchy black-and-white TV, of that yellowing newspaper cover of my youth.

What happened? I mean, lots, but ultimately the costs were too high, the tangible benefits too nonexistent, and the Space Shuttle was too much of an unmitigated disaster from start to finish in every way.

What happens next? Well, there we have a quick answer: we’re going back! America is going to land the first woman on the moon by 2024! Absolutely!

…you’re absolutely right to be very skeptical.

There are a numerous “lunar exploration architectures,” or ways to return to the Moon. My friend Casey Handmer, a physicist, space enthusiast, and former levitation engineer, itemizes them in this excellent blog post from a few months ago. One of them is NASA’s proposed Lunar Gateway, which will place a space station into high Moon orbit, from and to which lunar landings will descent and return.

Is this a good idea? …Well, it’s an idea. But it’s better to have a plan and to be making progress on it that not, right? Right? …Except the last few months have seen a bewildering flurry of chaos and confusion which makes NASA’s lunar program more closely resemble a headless chicken than a smoothly oiled machine.

First, an unsigned five-page document, riddled with spectacular grammar and spelling errors such as

There is no feasible means to redesign it or any other heavy left rocket to more transport the lunar landing elements

(!) was shared by “the Gateway program office at Johnson Space Center in Houston,” reported Ars Technica. (Casey wrote an exegesis of this dubious document, if you want to see it deconstructed in detail.) Then, earlier this month, NASA demoted and replaced its executives in charge of human space exploration.

Does this sound like the behavior of a lunar project accelerating to an on-target, on-time landing? Or more like a bureaucratic catastrophe thrashing frantically while failing to get anywhere at all? “As it stands, few experts believe NASA’s plan for returning to the moon in 2024 is feasible,” says Vox mordantly. You don’t say.

I’d be so delighted to see a woman walk on the moon in 2024. But I’m not exactly holding my breath. By 2032 we will have gone sixty years, three generations, between human lunar excursions. Some people think we shouldn’t go back at all, that there is too much of more importance to do here on Earth. I disagree, strongly, but I think even they might still agree that it would be sad beyond belief if, if and when we next land on the Moon, there’s no one around who remembers the last time.