We think it has. Back on 31st December 2019, Jos Sluijsmans, Founder-Director of the International Cargo Bike Festival, and I declared the 2020s the Decade of the Cargo Bike. Right now, the cargo bike is making a break for the mainstream. And not just in traditional northern European cargo bike heartlands such as the Netherlands and Denmark, but also in places like Germany, France, the UK, and Canada. Sales are booming, with manufacturers reporting increases of over 50% year-on-year despite COVID....

But, the tech is actually being applied to other important industries such as agriculture and supply chain management. For example, IBM is putting sustainable shrimp on the blockchain and car manufacturer Ford is conducting a blockchain trial in hope of tracing cobalt. In fact, this is one the topics being discussed at our blockchain, fintech, and business event taking place in Amsterdam on October 15-17. Farming on the blockchain In agriculture, an industry that employs over one billion people and generates more than $1....

From your weight to your money, there’s a tracking app for everything nowadays. Sure, they can make our lives more convenient, and they give us a sense of control, but just the fact that they exist doesn’t mean we should actually use them. In fact, some are simply abusing our laziness to gather personal information for commercial purposes. Recently, millennials have been bombarded with a slew of new personal finance apps....

On some level, it’s this feeling that Honor sees some potential in. And why the company has just announced a whole gamut of products with its ‘Smart Life’ and ‘Honor Choice’ range. What does that mean? Well, you could soon fill your home with the Honor Choice kettle, lamp, humidifier, vacuum, and toothbrush, as well as the more regular phones, TVs, and tablets you’d expect from a tech company. Yep, you read that right: kettle....

A digital twin helps people analyze and predict a system’s behavior under different conditions. The systems being twinned are typically very complex and require significant effort to model and track. Digital twins are useful in a wide variety of domains, including supply chains, health care, buildings, bridges, self-driving cars and retail customer personas to improve efficiency and reliability. For example, a warehouse operator can optimize a warehouse’s performance by exploring the response of its digital twin to various material handling policies and equipment without incurring the cost of making actual changes....

Enter Generation Z (Gen Z). Born between the mid-1990s and 2010, they make up 32% of the population, according to UN and Bloomberg data – more than the number of millennials and baby boomers. As early adopters of ride sharing and micromobility, their collective ‘buying power’ could have a positive impact on urban mobility. Their influence on the transport sector over the next decade raises some important questions. How can mobility providers capture the interest of these young commuters as they enter the workforce and support their green values?...

As pro-democracy rallies rage in the territory, protestors are increasingly giving up on SMS, emails and China’s social media Swiss army knife WeChat in favor of peer-to-peer mesh networking apps like Bridgefy and FireChat. With the government keeping a close eye on social networks — homegrown and elsewhere — in an attempt to stifle dissent, these off-the-grid messaging apps have proven to be a blessing in disguise. According to Forbes, downloads of Bridgefy has skyrocketed by 4,000 percent over the past 60 days, citing metrics from Apptopia....

SaaS won. Piracy died. It’s not that you can’t pirate software today; there are still cracked versions of Office and Photoshop out there. But today’s best business software can’t be pirated. You can’t torrent Slack, pirate Salesforce, crack Notion to give you more features for free. “Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share,” lamented a young Bill Gates in 1976, whose dreams of hiring 10 developers to build software for his nascent Micro-Soft company seemed threatened by rampant sharing....

The core driving force of any functioning business is of course its people. In the AI industry in particular, many startups struggle to win over talented developers, which often get snatched up by larger tech companies. We spoke to four startups taking part in the EU’s X-Europe accelerator to find out how they attract top talent, with less resources than Big Tech giants. We’ve collected a variety of, not only useful tips and insights, but also a prognosis for the future of AI programmers in Europe....

And while I’m not advocating for you to continue working from home or stating that the future of work will be fully remote, I think it’s important for employees to have the choice. So, if you’ve fallen in love with working from home over the past few months and would like this to be part of your “new normal,” here’s how you should communicate your wishes to your boss. [Read: 7 tips on lockdown career advancement — for employees and managers]...

The smartphones of today are drearily similar, but what they lack in variety they offset in customization. Android users (we the best) are particularly blessed: we can personalize our devices until they’re unrecognizable. Our unglamorous status bars, however, are often cruelly neglected — and that isn’t fair. Here’s how to give your status bar the makeover it deserves. If that doesn’t fulfill your customization desires, you can get a load more with a third-party app....

The “joinable calls” feature should be handy for the perennially tardy. WhatsApp says it also brings the spontaneity and ease of in-person chats to group calls: The joinable calls will remain end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp has also integrated a call info screen, which shows who’s currently on the call and who hasn’t shown up yet. The feature is now rolling out to users globally. Here’s how to use it: Joining an incoming WhatsApp group call Joining a missed group call That’s it!...

Chrome 90 has a cool trick that enables support for pasting files from your desktop right into web pages where they’re supported — like in Gmail. That should shave off a few seconds’ work when sharing attachments in your email messages. Here’s how to enable the feature and use it: First, ensure you have Google Chrome 90 (the latest version at the time of writing) installed. To update Chrome, click on the menu button (the one with three dots) near the top right corner, and navigate to Help > About Google Chrome....

We have already seen headlines suggesting that coronavirus vaccines are imminent, while scientists desperately try to manage expectations that it’s more likely to take more than a year for vaccines to be suitable for use. So how do we approach science news like a scientist, to see past the sensational and find the facts? In a recent study, we and our colleagues analyzed 520 academic papers and the media articles that reported their findings....

There’s a lot of internet and there are a ton of articles to read. But you can’t catch up on all of them in one day, so it’s important to have a system to save or bookmark them somewhere. I’ve been using the Pocket app for years to mark interesting long reads, and read them later on my iPad before going to the bed. But if you don’t want to install another app on your phone, you can just use Chrome’s reading list feature....

As a recap, the device features a Kirin 980 chip, 8GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and 5G connectivity, powered by a 4,500 mAh battery and super-quick 55W charging. It’s a bit disappointing the device is using the Kirin 980 instead of the newer 990 at this price, but it’s still a capable chip. The folding display covers an 8-inch diagonal, or a 6.6-inch one when folded. Unlike the Galaxy Fold, the bendy panel is exposed when the device is folded....

I enlisted in the US Navy exactly 21 years ago today, on 17 February 2000. I knew at least two of the US Marines who died in the 2004 battle the video game portrays. And, by the time Six Days In Fallujah was canceled in 2009, dozens of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and marines I knew were still in that theater. It was weird to imagine playing a video game based on a war my friends were still fighting in....

Hold on, what’s that vile, musty, and inescapable smell? Shhh, friend, don’t concern yourself with that, it’s just the latest issue of Plugged In. We all have enemies. And if you say you don’t, then you either haven’t thought about it hard enough, or you’re a dirty liar. Me? I have loads. A veritable adversarial smorgasbord. But, today, I’m here to talk about just one: mold. Yes, friends, I’m at war with fungus....

There’s a problem though. If this news is excellent (which I’m certain it is), then why do I feel so sad? Before we try and unpack that mess, let’s suckle on a little slice of context. For the past several years, the writing has been on the wall for Apple’s proprietary Lightning standard. Arguably, the biggest driver behind this has been the EU, which has been pushing for a single smartphone charger standard across the union....

Rather than face your disappointed co-workers after such an unforgivable oversight, you decide it would be best if you just stopped time and waited for them all to die before you return to work. So, like any space traveler hip to the works of Albert Einstein, you decide to park your spaceship at the perfect edge of a black hole. What happens next? Nothing good, that’s what. But it’s a lot of fun to talk about....