Ralf Bamert

The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this dynamic on its head. First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be commoditized leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle.

The result is the shift in value predicted by the Conservation of Attractive Profits. Previous incumbents, such as newspapers, book publishers, networks, taxi companies, and hoteliers, all of whom integrated backwards, lose value in favor of aggregators who aggregate modularized suppliers -- which they often don't pay for -- to consumers/users with whom they have an exclusive relationship at scale.

The objective of ICOs and IEOs are essentially the same, which is to offer tokens to a large group of investors. An IEO is basically an ICO except that it is launched and managed by an existing exchange instead of the organization that created the token. The exchange holds and sells the token on behalf of the project team. This small change has significant effects on the entire process.

Many of the top exchanges who are hosting IEOs have different requirements that involve holding or using their own platform tokens in order to participate in the IEO. By creating this condition, exchanges create demand for their internal tokens, which increases its value.

The exchanges benefit in that they receive new interest from those people who want to invest in the IEO, but were not already on their platform. Essentially, both the exchange platform and the IEO project are promoting each other in a way that wouldn't have happened during a normal ICO.

A digital twin is a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. By bridging the physical and the virtual world, data is transmitted seamlessly allowing the virtual entity to exist simultaneously with the physical entity. Digital twin refers to a digital replica of physical assets (physical twin), processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes. The digital representation provides both the elements and the dynamics of how an Internet of things device operates and lives throughout its life cycle. Definitions of digital twin technology used in prior research emphasize two important characteristics. Firstly, each definition emphasizes the connection between the physical model and the corresponding virtual model or virtual counterpart. Secondly, this connection is established by generating real time data using sensors. The concept of the digital twin can be compared to other concepts such as cross-reality environments or co-spaces and mirror models, which aim to, by and large, synchronise part of the physical world (e.g., an object or place) with its cyber representation (which can be an abstraction of some aspects of the physical world). Worthy of mention is David Gelernter's book on Mirror Models. Digital twins integrate internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning and software analytics with spatial network graphs to create living digital simulation models that update and change as their physical counterparts change. A digital twin continuously learns and updates itself from multiple sources to represent its near real-time status, working condition or position. This learning system, learns from itself, using sensor data that conveys various aspects of its operating condition; from human experts, such as engineers with deep and relevant industry domain knowledge; from other similar machines; from other similar fleets of machines; and from the larger systems and environment in which it may be a part of. A digital twin also integrates historical data from past machine usage to factor into its digital model. In various industrial sectors, twins are being used to optimize the operation and maintenance of physical assets, systems and manufacturing processes. They are a formative technology for the Industrial Internet of things, where physical objects can live and interact with other machines and people virtually. In the context of the Internet of things, they are also referred as "cyberobjects", or "digital avatars". The digital twin is also a component of the Cyber-physical system concept.

Researchers at Columbia University in the US have developed a new device structure in which they can vary the "twist" angle between layers of 2D materials (such as graphene) and study how this angle affects their electronic, optical and mechanical properties. The measurements, which are carried out on a single structure rather than multiple ones (as was the case before), could advance the emerging field of "twistronics" - a fundamentally new approach to device engineering.

"Simply varying the angle between 2D material layers thus means that graphene can be tuned from being metallic to semiconducting. Indeed, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently discovered that placing two layers of graphene together, but rotated relative to one another at the 'magic' angle of 1.1° turns the normally metallic material into a superconductor."

Achieving this variety of electronic properties in conventional materials normally requires changing their chemical composition. The ability to vary the electronic property of a 2D material simply by altering the twist angle between its layers is therefore a fundamentally new direction in device engineering, he adds.

"Until now, we have only studied graphene and boron nitride but there exists a large class of 2D materials that can be integrated with one another in similar ways. These materials can be metallic, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic and superconducting.

"At the most basic level, our study shows that there is a fundamentally new way to control these materials that just doesn't exist in conventional semiconductor heterostructures. It therefore opens the door to a whole new field of research in which material properties can be varied by simply twisting material layers."

The Exponential Quotient (ExQ) of an organization indicates the exponential readiness of an organization.

On ExO is charaterized by the ExO formula = MTP + IDEAS + SCALE

MTP: Massive Transformative Purpose

External ExO attributes: SCALE (Access Abundance)

S taff on Demand

C ommunity & Crowd

A lgorithms

E ngagement

Internal ExO attributes: IDEAS (Manage Abundance)

I nterfaces

D ashboards

E xperiments

A utonomy

S ocial