Simply No Substitute – The Battle For Rare Earths
Warning: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in /homepages/24/d76955756/htdocs/timharper/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 3360
Tim Harper's Thoughts on Innovation and Emerging Technologies
The spat over Huawei is just the beginning of the battle for control of the internet of things and AI at the Edge
I’ve spent most of 2018 in China (or it feels that way) involved in water treatment, intelligent sensing and advanced composite materials. It’s been useful to get a perspective on the words second largest economy, but also working with Chinese colleagues and getting to know their sometimes different expectations and priorities. At the same time I’ve continued to voraciously devour …
Business Cloud asked a variety of tech leaders and futurists for their predictions for 2019. The answers almost all involve AI, communications and sensors. This represents a quite remarkable shift away from the app driven idea of innovation that has held sway for the past decade to a more balanced view of both the hardware and the software making use …
There has been a lot of discussion about the lack of commercial applications of graphene, and the reason may be that much of what has been sold as graphene isn’t. A recent paper in Natureconcluded that: . . .As one can clearly see, the majority of the companies are producing less than 10% graphene content and no company is currently …
There’s nothing like a fight to enliven the afternoon session of a conference, and over the years graphene has delivered this in spades. It arouses passions stronger than its fabled strength, especially when academics and companies inhabit the same space. But why can’t academics and companies just get along? I’ve witnessed other almost violent outbursts over production methods, the ability …
I’m speaking at a conference later this week Photonex, where I’ll be repeating my mantra about never investing in materials companies. I’ve been banging on about this since the early days of nanotechnology, when buckyballs and nanotubes were the hot materials. The fashionable materials business model is tried (and for reasons that escape me) trusted and goes like this: Identify …
We’ve been waiting for years for Manchester to create some graphene related businesses despite being the global hub for graphene research. One has finally popped up, Graphine Ltdwhich claims that “Graphene can further enhance the already excellent properties of rubber and elastomers by improving their strength, elasticity, flexibility, thermal stability, resistance to chemicals and durability. With the support of Grafine …
Brexit changed a lot of things in Britain, including the government which led to the loss of any champion in Westminster for the Northern Powerhouse. But while the Northern economy is less visible politically there is still plenty happening, as revealed by this month Bessemer Society confab in Sheffield. In a way the collapse of the government sponsored Northern Powerhouse …
Industrial strategies have a bad name in the UK and deservedly so. Repeated attempts at government intervention to stimulate industrial sectors led to a string of failures from Blue Streak to INMOS and reached their peak with British Leyland in the 1970s; a company where people who had no interest in making anything other than tea were herded together in …