Davos leaders are gathering this week to change the world. Again.
Sounds pretty good to me. Except this is a quote by the Chairman on the focus of Davos 2007. In 10 years , nothing seems to have changed at Davos.
Meanwhile inventors and doers who were likely not at Davos in 2007 have changed the world in ways never imagined by the billionaires and technocrats who appear to run the world as we know it.
Wrapped in the rhetoric of changing the world and solving inequality, what you have is a collection of successful and (mostly very) rich people who are there to get to know each other and make deals.
Nothing wrong with that.
But let’s stop pretending that the solution to any of our world’s problem is going to emanate from Davos.
The next iPhone, Tesla, CRISPR, solar panel, Uber, self driving car is being invented in a lab or a garage somewhere while dealmakers of today gather in an artificially constrained city in the middle of Europe purely because of history. The rational thing would be to throw the same party in Bali or Durban. But the rational thing is inconvenient for the crowd that is used to things staying the way they always have been while preaching radical change to others.
Unlike the other critics, I am an optimist. The world is getting better when you look at it through the arc of history. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty and while we keep fearing the rising inequality in this world, the ability of the poor to get access to technology has never been better. This seems hard to believe because our experience suggests that the world is ever more divided between billionaires and the average person.
Illumina just announced that we will be able to read the full human genome for $100 — something that would have taken $2.7B a decade ago will soon be available for $100 to you and me.
We all know that our iPhones have more computing power and memory than the computers for Apollo 13.
The median income earner in America today has access to technology that would cost millions of dollars just a few decades ago. Rather than argue about the perceived inequality between the billionaires and millionaires, we need to get the next billion global citizens into the fold of the global middle class.
Davos continues to be a hub for the movers and shakers but it is an opaque event whose presentations and content are nowhere close to the energy of a TED event. Or even a vibrant open discussion on Twitter on a good day.
Perhaps the fundamental fallacy of Davos is that its a geographically constrained closed network of a select few when we live in a world where presidents of nations, and CEOs of companies like AirBnB, are interacting with a much larger open network of humanity through social media.
Perhaps, Davos needs to morph into a different beast — warmer, more open, and accessible to everyone especially those that are truly changing the world.

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A fun little side project-cum-startup from two of the founders of Soundwave, the social music company acquired by Spotify, wants to turn patents into art. Launching today, Retro Patents lets you buy prints of famous patents to hang on your office wall, or at home, if that’s your thing.
The patent prints for sale include games consoles, such as the original Nintendo Gameboy and Sony PlayStation, mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone and original BlackBerry, and more ubiquitous inventions like the humble calculator or computer mouse. Each patent has been designed and printed using HDR ink-jet technology on Ultra Premium Luster Photo Paper with a basis weight of 180 gsm.
“When we set up Soundwave, we were always looking for inspirational art to decorate our homes and offices. We thought founder quotes and motivational posters were interesting but a bit played out,” explains Retro Patents’ Craig Watson.
“We preferred to focus on the spark of inspiration around a product. We used to find early screenshots of successful startups (Instagram, Evernote etc) and print these out and laminate them by hand! It was a good way of reminding us that every great company started out with a basic idea and not to get bogged down in all the other distractions that often get in the way of scaling out a startup”.
But Watson says it took a trip to Copenhagen with Aidan Sliney (both are co-founders of Soundwave) and their respective wives, who now make up Retro Patents’ four founders, before the new startup idea was born. It was in the Danish capital city that they came across a boutique design shop that had an old Harley Davidson patent in the window.
“We really liked the minimalist look to it and remembered how we’d used early product prototypes for inspiration in the past. On the trip home we started brainstorming how we could apply this to the tech and gaming world which we both know and love,” he says.
And so it was that Retro Patents was set up to scratch an itch. At first, the team were just printing patent artwork to hang on their own walls, “but we kept getting asked by friends to send them copies. After this happened a few times we felt like others might also enjoy them so we built the patent art website which you see today”.
But do patents really make good art? “I’m obviously biased but I really do think patents make good art,” answers Watson. “It’s a fun contrast mapping classic inventions onto a contemporary design. We’ve also tried hard to keep the prints as minimalist as possible so that the focus is on the product itself. There was a temptation to include too much information (like a patent itself) but we’re really proud of the final result and the quality of the prints”.
To get your own custom patent print, just visit the Retro Patents site , choose your favourite design, the size that you want, and complete the checkout process. The startup says it ships worldwide, with an estimated delivery time of 3-7 business days.

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Panasonic is hoping that it can get even closer to partner Tesla, after the relationship between the two has proven so fruitful in the realm of electric vehicle batteries. The Japanese company is looking to become involved in the production of Tesla’s self-driving system, too, with a proposal of collaborating on sensor development.
That’s according to Panasonic CEO Kazuhiro Tsuga, who expressed interest in Tesla’s self-driving tech in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.
“We are deeply interested in Tesla’s self-driving system,” CEO Kazuhiro Tsuga told Reuters. “We are hoping to expand our collaboration by jointly developing devices for that, such as sensors.”
Currently, Panasonic is the exclusive supply partner for Tesla for batteries used in its vehicles, including the Model S and Model X. It will also supply the upcoming Model 3, which will require a significant increase in supply since Tesla aims to ship 500,000 of these cars in its first year.
Panasonic is a co-investor in Tesla’s Gigafactory, with $1.6 billion contributed to the $5 billion facility, and it will be working with Tesla more extensively on solar energy products going forward. The company also makes CMOS image sensors, and is currently working on a new version which would allow for sensing at very high-speeds of objects in motion, without the sacrifice in terms of distorted images normally associated with that kind of image detection.
Imaging sensors are a key part of an autonomous car, and the more accurate these become in a range of settings, the better for the eventual sensor fusion that combines data including photographic images, radar and LiDAR sensor info.
Teaming with Panasonic on sensors could help Tesla move more of that part of the business in-house, a move which is currently part of former Google self-driving car project Waymo’s strategy to help build more integrated systems with lower component costs over time.

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