What companies are you excited about?

1) Personal favourite: Collaboration between Fairphone and E-foundation https://e.foundation/fairphone-and-e-expand-the-availability...

2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/ (Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)

3) https://tutanota.com/

4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors

5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

6) Signal (https://signal.org)

7) https://brave.com

8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)

10) https://Plausible.io

11) https://small-tech.org/

12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/

Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.

Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)

Most companies while started on technical innovations, gradually move to “MBA” driven organisations that usually try to secure their revenue, instead of taking risk. In that regard, open source itself is the biggest innovation of the 21st century. And I’m hopeful that open source will move to other technical area of innovation also.

SiFive [1] "SiFive is the first company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA"

I think they have a bright future ahead. If there was a way to buy their stock / invest in them, I would.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiFive

SpaceX.

Watching Falcons land is one of the few things that still give me warn and reassuring feeling about the future.

As you’re talking about Apple, I find System76’s Linux computers, especially their notebooks [1] and their Ubuntu-based Pop! OS [2] a breeze of fresh air. This hardware/software combination gives me an Apple-like experience while committing to free software. The OS’s UX is very developer friendly as windows can be moved around and tiled using keyboard shortcuts. Then there’s a launcher bar similar to CMD+space on macOS. Pop! OS comes with their own app store (pop shop) which makes discovering and installing more apps dead simple. And the notebook’s build quality and performance is really good.

[1] https://system76.com/laptops

[2] https://pop.system76.com/

Not sure one should be excited about companies themselves, when I was more of a technophile (which I now certainly am not anymore) I used to be excited (for lack of a better word) about some particular people's concrete actions and deeds, most of them programmers or IT people (because I'm a programmer myself), but I'm sure that viewpoint can be extended to other domains, too.

Pine64 and especially the PinePhone with Convergence Kit.

I realise that this is pretty niche and still somewhat rough and unpolished - but the idea of being able to plug a dongle to your phone, connect monitor+mouse+keyboard to that dongle and have full, regular desktop operating system seems very intriguing to me.

UPMEM

They're etching a small CPU in each block of 4GB of RAM. This means a vast compute power at low electrical power. An Intel CPU spends 650 pJ transporting data from RAM, and then 3 pJ doing an addition. Data IO bandwidth and latency are most of the latency.

Programming paradigms with map-like processing are already structured to take advantage of it. Say you hava a Big Data Spark job. Chunk your partitions to be 2GB input, 2GB output; and your mapPartitions operation would be almost free.

I don't know how far they are in the deployment/market aspect though. But if I could invest in them, I would.

https://www.upmem.com/

Have a look at companies seeking the "Respects Your Freedom" certification by Free Software Foundation: https://ryf.fsf.org/products.

NanoVMs (https://nanovms.com / https://nanos.org), a Linux-compatible unikernel for virtualized environments. You don't need to deploy a whole Linux distro, no binaries but your application, only the libraries that you need. No multi-user, no multi-process, nothing like that - just the unikernel, the required libraries and your application. This improves security (far fewer points of attack), startup time, memory consumption and it may also improve performance a bit.

1) reMarkable Tablet (https://reMarkable.com/) - closest tablet experience to pen and paper.

2) Xolo (https://xolo.io/) - a SaaS-like way to run a company in Europe.

https://puri.sm/products, Social Purpose Corporation. They make security and privacy focused phones and computers designed for GNU/Linux.

They actually care about changing the industry for the better: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

1) Chip makers (AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Apple etc). Chips are still improving. Theres always new applications to more compute eg: 3D work can be done on laptop now, realistic renders can be ray traced with consumer graphics cards, phones can do voice recognition and so on locally. I mentioned graphics a lot but video games look amazing and some will be photo-realistic in ~10 years.

2) Tesla and other car companies. Battery costs have reduced 10x in a few decades, cars now have OTA updates and increasingly sophisticated self driving abilities (already pretty good on the highway). Whole car industry is going to electrify in the next few decades.

3) Space X is making space transport way cheaper, and Starlink seems to be a great internet solution for remote areas.

3) Open source or donation based projects. Apps such as Blender, VLC, Signal continue to improve. Sites such as Our World in Data and Wikipedia provide amazing value. Open standards such as RISC-V, AV1 continue to push forward.

4) Wind and solar. Costs have reduced 10x in a few decades. The tech is being pushed to their efficiency limits, solar can still improve a lot. Of course, the intermittency of renewables remains an issue.

I would also add Apple's health organization as an exception, for example they're rumored to have non-invasive glucose monitoring in the works for Apple Watch.

I’ve been using Notion as a personal knowledge base for a couple of years now, and I still feel a sense of joy every time I fire it up (countless times a day). It’s simple, yet elegant.

That said, I don’t know anything about the company. I’m excited about the product and where it’s headed.

I think 3D Hubs(https://www.3dhubs.com/) is pretty exciting!

I am excited about Project Vesta [1], which looks to me like one of the most feasible solutions to large-scale carbon capture.

[1] https://www.projectvesta.org

TBH, I’d rather be excited about specific teams/groups of people regardless of where they work. The trouble these days is filtering out the “influencers” and the marketing image, since we seldom get good insights as to how they work together and what their intent is when building a product or part of a technology stack.

Thoughtful approaches are, IMHO, the best indicator of whether a company is going the right way.

So Cognitect seems like an interesting place, for instance.

I still kinda excited about OpenAI. Even though they did a massive bait and switch with the name, their offerings still none the less never fail to amaze me.

When GPT-3 first came out the results were jaw dropping for me. Now with Dall-e. Draw an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog.. who wouldn't find that amazing? So I'm just waiting what their next demo will be.

DeepMind software into Boston Dynamics hardware = singularity!?

Telegram, I've been using this app for >6 years (I think).

The best chatting experience. SO much better that Watsapp

There’s massive innovation in biotech right now. RNA vaccines are winning the COVID battle, based on extremely cool technology (pseudouridine to evade innate immunity, two prolines to lock the spike in prefusion conformation, lipid nanovesicles for delivery,...). RNA drugs are also being developed to treat cancer (by vaccinating against patient-specific neoantigens), MS (by inducing immune tolerance to suppress autoimmunity), etc.

AlphaFold2 appears to have solved the protein structure problem entirely in software, which will lead to breakthroughs in drug design.

Deep learning is being used to augment microscopy leading to amazing advances in resolution.

I could go on. Last year saw the greatest number of new drug approvals in a long time, and VC funding levels were also very healthy.

Biotech is where it’s at.

purism. In fact I just got a computer from them. They make modern computers with Coreboot instead of proprietary bios. They need all our support!

Jolla - one of the first companies trying to keep the dream of a full linux phone alive after Nokia buried it.

ReMarkable - very good hardware e-paper note taking tablet. It needs better software and I hope they'll grow enough to build it.

Edge Impulse - embedded (Tiny) ML GitHub-like platform. Just incredible. (https://edgeimpulse.com)

OnlineTown - Well executed spatial chat with a playful videogame interface. I think they've been posted about on here before. (https://theonline.town)

Neosensory (ok, it's a company I co-founded) - we do consumer sensory augmentation. Our first product, Buzz, is a haptic sensory substitution wristband that translates sound to touch in real-time. Also has a developer API. (https://neosensory.com)

The work at ILM for virtual production of films is pretty incredible, you can google how The Mandalorian was made and read a bit about stagecraft (their software) online

FFI (Fortescue Future Industries)

The chairman is giving a cracker of a talk on it this weekend: https://www.fmgl.com.au/docs/default-source/announcements/dr...

1. https://futureland.tv - A social network around daily journaling.

2. https://umami.is - A web analytics alternative to Google Analytics, allows self-hosting and much more.

I am waiting for the time when every "normal" website is so censored and shitty that the average joe is using tor. Then we can create a truly free internet and the cycle starts again. Seems like I have to wait just a few more years.

I'm volunteering at a super exciting non-profit where we are adding autonomous aerial vehicles to the arsenal of tools needed to fight the wildfires in CA.

If anyone wants to help in any way, please contact me by emailing my handle here at gmail.

Tesla. Far ahead of the competition in software, electronics and battery technology.

Doesn't exist yet but something/handbook to consistently create a reliable backend for X amount of usage & customise other aspects of a SaaS without worrying about the stuff under the hood.

List of companies selling DRM-free media: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide.

https://oxide.computer/ Finally some serious innovation on Server Hardware side

Basecamp and Hey, because I use their products and the byproducts of their products - Rails and Hotwire.

Probably Microsoft as they're the most dynamic and happening company out there. They also love Linux.

The one I just founded!