Billionaires Conquer the Final Frontier: The Week in Tech

This week, Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon and space company Blue Origin, became the second billionaire to reach the edge of space. Just a few days earlier, on July 11, Richard Branson did the same aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. When will Elon Musk and SpaceX's turn come? It is only a matter of time, argue experts, even though Bezos claims that he will focus on Mars.

“We are really just on the cusp of seeing the activity of commercial human space flight,” Commercial Spaceflight Federation President Karina Drees told Yahoo Finance Live this week. “Future generations are going to look at this moment as a pivotal moment for humanity when it comes to the expansion into space.”

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• Keeping track of employees remotely can be difficult. VenturesSoft has developed an app that uses face recognition to make it easier, said Jorge Kramis, General Director of VenturesSoft Mexico, in an interview with MBN. “(The app) uses Face Liveness Detection technology, which can identify if the person on the other side of the screen is a living being. It takes six pictures and analyzes eye movement and gestures. It also does depth analysis, which will not approve a flat photograph. No other application in the world incorporates both face recognition and liveness detection technology,” he explained. Read the complete conversation here.

• On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, Founder and former CEO of Amazon, became the second billionaire to reach the edge of space. Bezos flew with his brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old female aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. The trip used a space capsule built and designed by Bezos’ space venture Blue Origin to fly its passengers above the internationally recognized boundary of space. The first private space flight was taken just a week before by billionaire Richard Branson using a rocket designed by his company Virgin Galactic. Read more here.

• Technology development represents several challenges; education is an important one, wrote on MBN this week Joaquín Saldaña, Director of Strategy and Marketing for Latin America at Huawei. To address this, he says, elementary and midlevel education must incorporate digital skills to provide students the ability to navigate in the digital world and to have access to educational resources to become an active part of the digital society. “By acting on and succeeding, we should have taken only the first step: creating a savvy society of technology users”. Read the full article here.
   

• The digital transformation is customer-centric; it looks for new ways to do business to drive growth and improve lives and businesses, wrote this week Iñigo Rumayor, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Arcus Financial Intelligence. What really is digital transformation and what can we expect from it? He explains in this article published in Mexico Business, where he also shares how Arcus experiences this process.
   

• Airbus and One Web will manufacture and launch up to 650 satellites to provide affordable, high-speed internet access worldwide. To date, both companies have launched eight groups of satellite clusters, for a total of 254 low-Earth orbit spacecraft. “With 40 percent of our constellation complete, we are on track to achieve global connectivity by the end of next year — meaning OneWeb-powered high-speed, low-latency broadband will be available to Mexico next year,” Airbus Defence and Space told MBN after the eighth launch. Read the complete article here.

• On Monday, the US accused Beijing of being behind a massive cyberattack against Microsoft and blamed four Chinese cybercriminals. Last March, a cyberattack compromised tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange email servers around the world. According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, this is part of a “pattern of irresponsible, disruptive and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace” by China and “represents a major threat to our economic and national security.” He added that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) “has fostered an ecosystem of criminal hackers who carry out state-sponsored activities and cybercrime for their own financial gain.”

• Zoom Video will acquire contact service software provider Five9 for around US$14.7 billion, its biggest purchase so far. The deal will help Zoom expand its potential offerings for enterprise customers. The growth opportunity will allow the firm to tap into a US$24 billion contact center market, the company said on Sunday. “The trend towards a hybrid workforce has accelerated over the last year, advancing contact centers’ shift to the cloud and increasing demand by customers for customized and personalized experiences,” said in a statement Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan.