A few weeks ago, we posted about an education company that joined the Khronos Group’s OpenXR Working Group for VR and AR APIs. As I mentioned at the time, I have a personal interest in education technologies, due in part to my background before joining PC Perspective. While the education field is in need of more than just technology, companies like zSpace are building infrastructure to deliver information in new and more varied ways, which will hopefully reach more students (and reach the rest more deeply).
As for the news: after the previous post, zSpace followed up to let us know that they’ve been accepted into the Dubai Future Accelerators (DFA) program. This is a fairly large (hundreds of millions of dollars, USD) investment fund that primarily focuses on their amount of innovation. The fund has a handful of “challenge” areas, such as health and water / electricity, that are considered for the “public good” and thus eligible. I’m guessing zSpace qualified under “Knowledge and Human Development Authority” but their press release doesn’t elaborate.
Previously accepted companies, according to Forbes, are Honeywell and Hyperloop.
I'm not sure how much of our audience is focused in the education / IT sector, so let us know in the comments if you found this follow-up relevant to you. (PC Perspective allows anonymous comments, so you don't have to jump through too many hoops to leave your opinion.)
Dubai is an islamic state,
Dubai is an islamic state, and most funds are government control.
We are waging an economic war, so I would think twice doing business with islamic states. Nothing good can come out of it beside quick greed on the participants.
And yes, DFA is fully controlled islamic government entity.
Its nothing different then having an neo nazi funded think tank…
So yea.. thats my comment on this subject.
And not so thrilled that its also an islamic state that now owns and control IBM / US fabs .
Agreed, and their human
Agreed, and their human rights violations are atrocious. You can be jailed for being gay in Dubai. These startups need to think about that before getting into relationships with these Islamic countries.
They don’t own all of IBM/GF
They don’t own all of IBM/GF they are only an investment fund, and all religons are a threat to demorcracy and freedom. But do not expect technology companies to ever be able to vet their investor funds of such assoications.
P.S. the entire “technology” sector puts the Oil industry to shame for corruption. So it’s not so very easy to see through the vail(Pun Intended) of tech industry’s “Progressive” washing their image. The Technology industry(hardware, chips[lots of nasty chemicals], plastics) pollutes as much as the oil industry does, if not worse!
Well Money talks and it’s best not to employ Americans even in plants that are located on US soil! That will help to keep the money out of fascist Joe Six-pack’s hands! Use ROBOTS to make things as ROBOTS do not discriminate based on skin color, or religion, or sexual orientation. And ROBOTS work 24/7 365(+1 for leap year) and do exactly as they are told/trained, over and over again without the owners having to worry about discrimination lawsuits because filthy humans can not get along with each other.
Strictly looking at the
Strictly looking at the technology and not the controversy, it is an interesting subject.
Knowing more about various types of educational IT content can be useful to bring awareness to students of all ages and their teachers and could be applied in their field of study.
Although I’ve been a
Although I’ve been a reader/listener of Pcper for a long time, I’ve never commented on any posts and such. But I felt that I need to dispel some ridiculous notions about Dubai:
1. The people who live, and work there (locals or expats) are not part of some deep rooted cult, in fact most people don’t care so much about politics unless it has immediate financial repercussions.
2. The ratio of locals vs.”foreigners” would shock some as to why they haven’t just kicked the locals out.
3. As such, it became the destination for American (e.g. Microsoft, HP, Logitech, NVIDIA, BOEING etc.), European, Chinese and other global corporations to open branches that do business for that region for a reason: there’s money to be made and none of these global corporations would risk being tied to any kind of political drama. In other words, business there does not pool into some kind of terrorist fund. Thats just plain stupid thinking.
4. Yes, there is a difference between the label of “ISIS” and a place where people worship what they want keeping that part of life to themselves and are willing to invest in things like educational programs.
Lest anyone thinks this is coming from some type of fanboy, I’m not from the UAE, and I don’t live there. But I’ve been there on business enough to know the above.
Anyhoo those are my 2(4)cents on this!
The program was launched to
The program was launched to connect the world’s most innovative companies with leading partners in the Dubai government to test new solutions to key challenges at the city-wide scale. Over 2,200 companies from 73 countries on all 7 continents applied for the prestigious program, and only 30 companies were chosen.