Technology

Guarantee the utility
At Possible Future, we refuse to let ourselves live in a world where the technological innovations available to consumers are electric scooters and smartphones at € 1500. A world where engineering wonders in production techniques are used to create perfect spinning rotors for hours.

This scooter is connected.
Here is a useful technology! No mistake: I’m not trying to say that technology and science are no longer useful today. We live longer than ever, with the comfort of life unequaled in the history of humanity. We can communicate with our loved ones from the other side of the earth. Hundreds of millions of deaths are prevented by vaccines.
In our interpretation, a useful technology is:
technology that saves lives: to provide access to health facilities adapted to populations in developing areas; a technology that puts us in a more sustainable and livable world: removing plastic from the oceans, capturing CO2 to limit global warming;

technology that solves a real problem for a group of people, so “small” is it: allow color-blind people to discover the world in its true colors, dyslexic children to learn with appropriate tools, etc.

Our wish is that Crowdfunding supporters and the big VCs of this world are interested in Seabin (a trash that cleans the water of plastic and hydrocarbon waste ports) rather than investing 120 million in Juicero (a press- juice that a simple hand can replace ), for fear of missing out on the next nugget. Apple has managed to sell over a billion iPhones but we are still unable to properly sort our own waste: we must review our priorities.

If I joined Possible Future, it is because we are really thinking about projects in order to have a positive impact on our society. And this positive impact is often based on a technology used in a reasoned manner, in a promising business context.
We are committed to realizing innovation projects, where the integration of technology to a solution comes as a response to real use. This ensures that technology adds value without unnecessarily complicating the solution. Ideally, a guardian of science and the sworn enemy of the gadget!

If this posture is necessary, it is also to ensure the maximum acceptability of solutions, not to create gas plants. When we imagine a digital service for building artisans, we do not add a thousand layers of AI and personalization to look pretty.

We focus our efforts on the availability of the service, the effectiveness of the app and maximizing the time saved by users in order to evacuate their rubble and make the public road more passable for all. When using the blockchain-inspired by CryptoKitties (a priori unnecessary), it is to reinvent the gift experience and maintain the biodiversity of corals.

In this world saturated with gadgets, it is high time to reposition with ambition technology and science not as a way to stack features in everyday objects, but as a lever to make our objects more useful.

Or why the gadget should never take precedence over the useful
Do you know the second most supported Kickstarter project in the history of the crowdfunding site? It’s cooler.
But here we’re not talking about the cooler at the last family picnic, which has been dusting since 2007 or equipment for hangover kids, who decide to have a picnic at the last minute and find an old bakelite object in the cellar. We are talking about the Cooler Rolls, which we are not afraid to tag on Instagram because we know that our 124 followers will be in full FOMO.
We are talking about CON-NEC-TÉE cooler kids. Warning the eyes!

Meet the Coolest Cooler
The Coolest Cooler, the wonder of ingenuity according to its creators, has a multitude of accessories: blender, sound system, flashlight, cutting board, and integrated bottle opener. Increased cooler if there is one: it adds all-round functionality.

On the other hand, there is never any question of making the object more efficient in its primary mission, that is to keep food and drinks cool. Yet the project has federated nearly 63,000 people, raising over $ 13 million. The height of absurdity or saving failure, this cooler was never delivered to the people who supported the project. It’s cooling!
Useful technology at risk?
Have you ever typed “useful technology” on Google? The results are often lists of gadgets, that is to say, objects that are fun and new, but mostly futile. By taking a step back, I wonder: does this mean that when someone wants to know more about innovation, science, and progress, he only has access via Google to a simple list of gadgets?

It’s scary when you know that Google is the first filter of access to digital knowledge, for a large majority of the population. Indeed, Google Search is the medium used by almost 90% of the world population connected to the Internet to learn and find information.
Are we reducing science and progress today to trivialities?

At least he remains Quora …
It is true that technological innovations “fun” can have a significant educational aspect, since they can be used to familiarize consumers with new technologies, in a fun context. For example, Amazon has allowed the general public to become familiar with voice assistants, although overall Alexa remains for the moment little useful. I remain convinced, however, that they should only be a marginal part of new products. More effort should be focused on creating useful objects and not on projects with buzz potential.

I also think that these “not really useful” innovations should not have such a big presence in the media: by promoting the futile, bandwidth is reduced, and at the same time the scope, useful technological innovations.