Louis Lehot

You’re embarking on a new business venture with a strong business plan. That’s exciting. A strong business plan can guide your business, define business goals, and outline objectives and risks. Part of those risks are unexpected expenses, which can be overwhelming and surprise founders who are not prepared. For venture-backed startups, there are intellectual property (IP) risks to start with, which is why it’s essential that the company, not individual founders or employees, owns the IP.

While artificial intelligence (AI) may occupy all the limelight from media, stock markets, large and small corporations, not to mention political figures, futurists and modernists know that the mainstreaming of quantum computing will enable the next real technology paradigm shift. From its beginnings in the speculative musings of physicist Paul Benioff in 1980 to the groundbreaking algorithms of mathematician Peter Shor in 1994, quantum computing was a transformative discovery. However, it was not until Google’s establishment of a quantum hardware lab in 2014 that the theoretical promises began to materialize into practical applications.

Companies spend billions and invest heavily in technologies that offer greater telepresence and enable an individual’s digital life. Will humans interact with each other via avatars in a three-dimensional virtual space?  The “Metaverse” has ramifications for everything people do to live, work and play together digitally. The Metaverse is a digital shared space where everyone can seamlessly interact in a fully immersive, simulated experience. The Metaverse increases the permeability of the borders between various digital environments and the physical world. In the Metaverse, you can interact with virtual objects and real-time information. A place where people join together to create, work, and spend time together in an environment that mixes what is virtual and what is real.

As the way we live and work has increasingly moved into virtual environments (I like to call it a legal metaverse), the boundaries between physical, digital, and biological worlds become blurrier by the day. Sensors lie within devices installed across every aspect of our home, office and mobile environments, connected from the edge of each of your devices to networks that are both local and cloud-based (with many in a foggy place between the two). The ensuing data traffic requires massive computing power for transfer, storage, analysis, and response. The migration to automated cloud computing power has further accelerated the deployment of containers across the public, private and hybrid cloud ecosystems for the transfer, storage, analysis, and response layers. Kubernetes and Docker have emerged as ubiquitous technologies to build, deploy and manage containerized applications using automation, and investors have noticed. Understanding the key legal issues will enable more successful client relationships for both vendors and customers, and inevitably growth and value creation.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has changed every aspect of our lives, digital transformation in healthcare has accelerated above others. The pandemic has changed the healthcare delivery paradigm from human to digital platforms faster than Klaus Schwab could have imagined. In 2016, the World Economic Forum chairman coined the phrase “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” envisioning the combination of fourth industrial-era technologies in hardware, software, and biology, or cyber-physical systems. These new technologies, leveraging advances in communication, connectivity, and computing power, would usher in a more efficient way to live, work, and socialize. Who knew how the horrific circumstances triggered by a global pandemic could accelerate an evolution that might have taken 20 years and condensed into a single year. Healthcare has gone digital, and there is no going back now.