Welcome to the week. In late March, we sent Hayden, our senior reporter, and Mick, from our art department, on a field trip. The two of them rode Metro North up from NYC, just past the Tappan Zee, and eventually found themselves outside of a curious crescent-shaped building.
That building was IBM’s quantum research lab, which was packed with peculiar gold instruments, fridges colder than outer space, and whiteboards full of complex equations. And at the center of it all was Jerry Chow, director of IBM Quantum and one of the most influential people in quantum computing.
Today, we’re publishing our first dispatch from that trip: an in-depth profile of Jerry. Click the link below to give it a read.
In today’s edition:
🖥 Jerry Chow is bringing quantum computing to life
 A sensible approach to energy use
 Coworking
—Hayden Field, Jordan McDonald, Dan McCarthy
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Dianna “Mick” McDougall
Jerry Chow, director of IBM Quantum, has been working to uncover the mysteries of quantum computing for more than a decade.
Resume rundown: He has risen through the company’s ranks since joining in 2010, leading IBM to announce a milestone achievement in 2021: breaking the quantum world’s famous “100-qubit barrier.”
- He also spearheaded the first-ever cloud-based quantum processor in 2016, making quantum computing publicly accessible for the first time—the single biggest catalyst for experimentation in the field, Moinuddin Qureshi, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told us.
“Before 2016, probably a few hundred people in the world [had] ever experimented with a quantum computer,” Qureshi, who worked as a research staff member at the T.J. Watson Research Center from 2007–2011, said. Since 2016, IBM said it has had more than 400,000 users of that platform. “To me, that has been the defining change,” he added.
Tens of thousands of people have heard Chow explain, via a 2015 TED Talk, why quantum computing matters. To paraphrase him, one reason is that no existing computer is advanced enough to explain the inner workings of the particles that make up our world.
- Even if someone packed a traditional computer chip with the same number of transistors as there are atoms in the galaxy, it still wouldn’t be powerful enough to understand even a molecule like caffeine, let alone the secrets of complex viruses or DNA.
Looking ahead…A quantum computer could eventually be able to do that and much more, but the field has to overcome several fundamental hurdles before it can achieve its imagined potential. Overcoming those hurdles is what Chow lives and breathes.
Here’s how Chow got to where he is today, and how he’s trying to revolutionize computing as we know it.—HF
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The future of the smart home could be as simple as…saving some money on your energy bill.
While a traditional meter tracks the energy use of appliances in the home, smart-meter companies are using technology to improve the granularity and precision of that tracking, with the aim of benefitting both homeowners and utilities.
Zoom in: One such smart-meter provider is Sense, a Massachusetts-based firm founded in 2013. The company announced $105 million in Series C funding in late April, bringing its total funding to nearly $152 million.
Sense’s nine-figure funding round is further proof of the smart meter market’s rise. In the US, smart-meter penetration reached 65% in 2020, increasing at a rate of 4–5% every year since 2016, according to Guidehouse Insights data cited by Utility Dive.
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Utilities are helping drive the adoption of smart meters, with state regulators recently approving recent massive smart-meter rollouts in Virginia and New Jersey.
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Smart meters can also help utilities manage distributed energy sources, like solar panels, battery storage, and EV-charging stations, by offering customers lower rates for energy consumption during off-peak hours, like in the middle of the night.
By the numbers: Sense CEO Mike Phillips told us that active users of Sense can save between 9%–15% on their utility bills, but only half of Sense’s more than 100,000 users reach those savings.
Looking ahead…Sense plans to use the funding to expand its partnerships with utilities, like Otter Tail Power Company, Longmont Power and Communications, and New York-based National Grid, as well as home construction and smart-home companies like Landis+Gyr and Schneider Electric.
Keep reading.—JM
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Is your current password management system just a sticky note or a shared doc? We’re right there with ya, but as it turns out, there’s a better method that keeps the simplicity but adds a ton of safety and security.
Dashlane is a web and mobile app that makes password management easy for people and businesses. Using a US-patented zero-knowledge security protocol, Dashlane ensures that nobody (not even Dashlane itself) has access to your data except you.
With best-in-class digital security tools, Dashlane empowers individuals and organizations to protect their data—not to mention saves you time and memory space by eliminating all those password resets.
Give yourself and your team a boost of security, productivity, and peace of mind. Try Dashlane for free.
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Illustration: Francis Scialabba, Photo: Yixuan Leow
Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?
I design machines by modeling out their components and deciding their manufacturing and assembly methods.
What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?
[I’m] most optimistic about direct/almost direct brain-to-machine communication interfaces (e.g. AI prosthetics), as they represent the next step in UI after Apple popularized touch-screen gestures, and we’ve seen the impact of convenience of the smartphone.
Least optimistic—not sure—but 3D printing has disappointed, as the baseline technology is very environmentally sensitive, hence inconsistency. [It] needs a lot of technical attention, and may take a long time before they can be the promised “household device” that they were hyped up to be.
One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?
It was never my dream to be a design engineer. I just picked it as a good discipline to understand technology development better.
What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?
Music!
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Photo Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Sources: Getty Images
Stat: A 2022 report from Splunk surveyed over 1,200 security leaders and found that 79% of those had been the target of a ransomware attack, our features team reports.
Quote: “I remember even back at Yale, we would talk the night before…playing video games, and then he would send me results that he had done from the experiment in the morning.”—Jay Gambetta, VP of IBM Quantum, on his longtime collaborator Jerry Chow
Read: Investor sentiment in Silicon Valley could be at its most negative since the dot-com crash.
Your brand, our voice. Ahem (*clears voice*). We take pride in what we put out into the world, and that includes crafting custom branded content for our beloved partners. Tell your brand’s story in new and exciting ways with the Morning Brew Creative Studio.
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EV subsidies in the US are not maximizing climate benefits, per an analysis from the Niskanen Center.
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Volkswagen, along with several partners, will invest $10.6 billion in EV and battery production in Spain.
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Pachama, which uses AI to verify nature-based carbon credits, raised a $55 million series B.
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Dinner could look different over the next 100 years.
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Francis Scialabba
What do Legos, renewable energy, and rockets have in common? They're all in this week's news quiz.
Click here to play.
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Last week, we launched IT Brew specifically for IT professionals looking to stay in the know—and have a little fun while doing it.
From cybersecurity to big data to software development to gaming, IT Brew drops all the latest industry news, trends, and insights right into your inbox twice a week.
Click here to subscribe.
This editorial content is supported by Robin.
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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:
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Written by
Hayden Field, Jordan McDonald, and Dan McCarthy
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