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While nobody knows for sure when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will arrive, separate recent announcements by IBM and researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago indicate that the timeline is shrinking. Once the technology goes mainstream organizations will need to adapt to the risk posed by quantum computers, which have the potential to break many of the cryptographic systems that we rely on today for secure communications and data protection.

To help organizations prepare the World Economic Forum has just published a quantum toolkit that outlines a set of principles that organizations can use to help ensure they are ready to enter the quantum computing era.

Transmutex, a 2023 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, is capitalizing on research validated at the European Organization for Nuclear Research to conceive an entirely new approach to nuclear energy, using particle accelerators to induce nuclear waste transmutation and produce carbon-free nuclear energy, in the hopes of speeding up the race to Net Zero.

Transmutex, along with other new players such as Newcleo, Radiant, Terrestrial Energy, X-Energy and NANO Nuclear Energy, use small modular reactors (SMRs) which can be built more quickly and cheaply than traditional nuclear power plants. While SMRs are increasingly being seen as a viable near-term addition to the energy mix, innovative clean energy approaches alone will not help the world get to Net Zero and ensure affordable energy for everyone.

After a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatility, according to a new World Economic Forum report called Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2023. Countries have shifted their focus to maintaining secure and stable energy supply at the expense of universal affordability.

Scaling new technologies and ensuring energy equity will require huge amounts of capital as well as new types of collaborations and actions by governments, financial institutions, and large corporates in traditional businesses, says Maciej Kolaczkowski, who oversees the Forum’s new Advanced Energy Solutions community.

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causaLens uses causality to introduce more nuance, reasoning and cause-and-effect sensibility into enterprise AI-decision making. The UK scale-up says its approach will allow enterprises to start creating solutions that can be used for their most critical tasks, including decisions that have a strong impact on their customers and broader society. BMW Group, Aviva and ScotiaBank are customers.
In healthcare, causaLens says its approach has accelerated discovery of protein biomarkers as a predictor for cancer by 100x. And in business, it says sophisticated marketing departments use its algorithms to identify the true drivers of customer behavior.

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Cost of a new Internet phone made by Reliance Jio, the telecommunications arm of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, according to a report by CNBC. Reliance Jio’s new feature phone aims to reduce the mobile connectivity gap between rural and urban India by giving non-smartphone users a cheaper alternative to switch from 2G to 4G mobile networks. The new phone, named Jio Bharat, serves as an entry-level phone for first time Internet users, allowing them to access digital payment services and content. India is already the world’s second-largest smartphone market and is likely to add 300 million new Internet users, making it the fastest country to provide Internet services to those who remain unconnected,