Kozminski Techblog

Electrophoretic technology was used to enable the color change function of the BMW IX Flow. – this car dresses and expresses the mood of the driver or its passengers. That is why we tried to create the appropriate technology to enable new experiences – said Christopher Grote, vice president of the bavarian company responsible for electronic solutions during the press conference. Changing the color is also possible while driving, e.g. when we are driving in hot weather and the black color becomes hotter. Then we press the appropriate button, pop… and we change che color of our car to white. In the implementation of this project, BMW cooperated with E-link, which has Sony and Amazon among its customers, and the technology was previously used in Kindle readers. The BMW E-link application works thanks to a special foil containing colored pigments, which covers the entire car. Through stimulation with electrical stimuli, the pigments float to the surface, and as a result, its color changes. “the challenge is not so much the technology as applying to the car”, admitted Christopher Grote.

Adrian van Hooydonk, head designer of the brand and head of BMW Group design makes no secret that the color change technology in the IX Flow concept is only part of BMW’s plan to develop products that stimulate all the senses and are “human oriented”. BMW intends to spend over 30 billion euro on these innovations by 2025. “For us, digitization is the total experience and emotion it can create”, said van Hooydonk. BMW was going to show the IX Flow at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) taking place in Las Vegas. The company planned a full program there with the participation of partners and media, but eventually abandoned this presentation in favor of an online premiere in Munich. The reason was the increase in the incidence of coronavirus.

The ability to change the color of the car, also while driving, is a technological novelty, but not a revolution. There has been a reflective chameleon varnish on the market from some time. A car painted with it may have different shades depending on how the light shines on the surface of the car. There are also paints that change color under the influence of heat, and soon in Audi cars it will be possible to do this with the use of an on-board computer at any time. Adaptive color change can contribute to additional environmental benefits. According to Audi, cars with black lacquer consume 1-2 percent more energy in the summer, so more energy is needed to cool down the hot air. In its “colorful” strategy, Audi plans to use special foils applied to the base coat. Modifying the displayed shades results in a different color. However, it will not be a change as drastic as in the BMW IX Float, because the color will change, for example, from light blue to darker blue.

So an NFT is not the artwork itself, but a kind of digital certificate or signature. You can think of the NFT as a unique notation of who owns a particular thing. This thing can be, for example, a small pixel image like the now famous Cryptopunks, but also the very first Twitter tweet or digital music. The NFT serves as a certificate that states: person X is currently the owner of file Y, which is located at Internet address Z.

The abbreviation NFT stands for a non-fungible token. Without foreign words: a non-exchangeable token. A token is an asset, in simpler terms, a token. A counterexample to the NFT, i.e. a fungible, exchangeable token, would be a ten-euro bill. You can exchange this banknote at will for other ten-euro bills. The value and function of the banknote remain identical. (The serial number of the banknote is different – but that doesn’t matter for the purpose). A bitcoin or a beer token at the funfair would also be fungible tokens.

Now, what makes such a token non-exchangeable is that it is part of a blockchain. All transactions are publicly recorded in such a digital register. The blockchain is also distributed decentrally in different locations and represents a sophisticated accounting system. It is therefore not possible to transfer an NFT to someone else without authorization, without this transaction being visibly stored in the blockchain. The provenance history is therefore always clear – unlike with analog artworks, where provenance is often a problem. At the same time, the NFT records to which object it refers. Therefore, an NFT that refers to the picture of a cryptopunk is something different than an NFT that refers to the album of a music group.

Multiple NFTs can belong to one object. This may be by design when the NFTs are created. One use case would be “limited editions” of artwork, perhaps 1,000 copies of a graphic or piece of music. It is also conceivable that an NFT refers to a part of an object, for example, a tenth of a painting or a third of a piece of real estate. One problem: NFTs can also be created for an object without permission. The NFT Thefts initiative calls plagiarism, or pirated art, a growing problem in the NFT space.

You may have heard two similar terms in the cryptocurrency world: proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. These terms are used to distinguish whether a cryptocurrency is mined or not. However, sometimes the distinction between these terms can be confusing. Let’s take a look at what the difference between these terms is.

Let’s start with the simplest part – the proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm. This algorithm requires people to use computer hardware to process transactions. This hardware, also known as mining, uses its computing power to solve mathematical problems and is rewarded with a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, and now Ethereum, still run on this algorithm. It was the first generation of blockchain, used in Bitcoin as the first cryptocurrency to use it.

The goal of proof-of-stake (PoS) is to achieve the same result as PoW – secure verification of transactions on the blockchain, but in this case, verifiers do so by providing a certain number of cryptocurrency tokens to a so-called staker, where they lock up their cryptocurrency and get a chance to verify the transaction, thereby receiving the associated reward and ensuring the security of the network. PoS is the next generation of how blockchain can work. It has several advantages over proof-of-work, such as you don’t need a super-powerful computer to verify transactions.

Drones have been a growing trend from a simple gadget and a cool toy, to a whole industry that has many applications in every sector. However, one thing was always constraining drones, battery and payload management, that had to be managed by humans. It’s a process that is currently manually done by humans that have to swap batteries and payload by hand costing companies a lot of money to employ them and is far less effective than it could be.

However, Airrow, an LA startup has emerged with its take on it. IT works in a similar way to a 3D printer, in that it has the X, Y and Z axis on which it operates to swap the batteries for charged ones and put the out-of-juice battery to charge.

The system is in a very early stage, and the same goes for the company. However, the solution seems to be working for batteries, and the company says they are ready to develop a similar process for payloads.

The solution was shown during this year’s Amazon re:Mars conference and gathered a lot of interest. The company says the system will cost around $80’000-$100’000, which is not cheap. Though the bundle also includes a drone that would work in a closely knitted fashion with the autonomous changing station.

Unfortunately, the conference happened only a few days ago, and the company is so new, that there are no publications on how this system operates exactly (ideally with videos) available on the internet. Once I spot something, I will update this post with videos and photos. For now, I gathered these from the firm’s LinkedIn:

Reference:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/airrow/posts/?feedView=all

Airrow is automating battery and payload swapping for drones